So my Twitter feed has been doing this thing for about a week now where every third tweet is somebody saying "I'm live, watch me!" with a link that dumps you into a jerky vertical video of them walking down a street or sitting in a car. That's Meerkat. If you haven't run into it yet you will soon, because it came out of nowhere at the end of February and by this week it had completely taken over the group chat I'm in with a couple of other people who write about this stuff for a living.
I finally installed it Wednesday night, mostly out of spite because I was tired of not knowing what everyone was talking about.
It's simple to the point of being almost nothing. You log in with Twitter (no separate account, no separate password to forget), you hit the record button, and you're live. People who follow you on Twitter get a notification and a link drops into your timeline automatically. There's a little chat scroll next to the video where people type comments and tap hearts that float up the screen like a cheap Instagram filter. That's it. That's the whole app.
The part that actually got me, though, is that there's no replay. None. When you stop streaming, it's gone. Not saved to your camera roll, not archived anywhere, nothing. If you weren't watching live, you missed it, forever. My first reaction was that this had to be a bug or a version-1.0 corner they cut to ship faster (it's iOS only right now too, so if you're on Android you're out of luck entirely, which feels like a weirdly common launch strategy lately). But the more I used it the more I think the no-replay thing might actually be the entire point. It's the opposite of everything else on my phone. Everything else is designed to be permanent and searchable and re-shareable. This is designed to evaporate.
I watched a guy livestream himself walking to a coffee shop in what I'm pretty sure was Austin for about six minutes, and it was one of the more oddly hypnotic things I've done on my phone this year. Nothing happened. He just walked, and forty or fifty people typed things at him in real time, and then he got his coffee and the stream ended and it was just gone, like it never existed. I don't fully understand why that's compelling but it kind of is.
Battery drain is brutal, by the way, worse than I expected. I streamed myself doing absolutely nothing (reorganizing a bookshelf, if you're curious) for about four minutes as a test and watched something like 6% of my battery disappear. Camera plus constant upload plus screen on will do that, I guess, but still.
Unrelated tangent, but this is the same week everybody's still chewing over Samsung's Galaxy S6 stuff from the Barcelona show, and I keep seeing people complain that Samsung finally ditched the removable battery and the SD card slot on the new phones. I actually don't care that much about removable batteries anymore, my S4's battery has never once died on me mid-day, but pulling the memory card slot feels like a genuinely user-hostile move dressed up as a design choice. I store almost nothing on internal storage on purpose specifically so I'm not locked into whatever tier Samsung decides to sell me. Anyway.
Also, completely separate complaint that has nothing to do with any of this: I finally got around to checking whether my mom's Lenovo laptop had that Superfish garbage preloaded on it from a couple weeks back, and it did. Took me twenty minutes on the phone walking her through the removal tool because she kept closing the window by accident. That whole situation still bugs me more than most tech scandals do, because it wasn't some hacker doing something sneaky, it was the manufacturer doing it to you on purpose before the box was even opened.
Back to Meerkat. I don't know if this is a thing that lasts six months or six years, apps like this tend to either become permanent fixtures or completely vanish and there's rarely an in-between. But for right now it's the first app in a long while that made me put my phone down and think "huh, that's actually a little different," instead of just recognizing the fortieth reskin of something I already had. I streamed myself for about ninety seconds total and immediately understood why nobody I know has managed to say anything interesting on it yet. Turns out most of us, myself very much included, are boring when there's no edit button.