So this week I did the thing everyone on my timeline was doing and downloaded Meerkat. If you missed it, Meerkat is this little livestreaming app that basically exploded out of nowhere at SXSW: you tap a button, it starts broadcasting video from your phone, and it posts the link straight to your Twitter feed. For about five days it felt like the only thing anyone in Austin was talking about. Founders doing demos in hallways, VCs pitching each other on camera, somebody livestreaming a taco line. Genuinely kind of fun to watch unfold in real time, even from my couch a thousand miles away.
Then Twitter happened, the way Twitter always eventually happens.
Word had already gone around that Twitter was buying up Meerkat's direct competitor, an app called Periscope that hasnt even launched publicly yet, for something in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars. Fine, whatever, thats just Twitter hedging on a feature it clearly should have built itself years ago. But then on Monday, Twitter cut Meerkat off from its social graph. Meaning: if you were a brand new Meerkat user who signed up with your Twitter account expecting the app to show you your friends so you could follow them, it just... didnt. I opened it myself Monday night to check and my follow list was basically empty. A ghost town. Not broken exactly, just hollowed out on purpose.
I dont think this should surprise anyone who has been paying attention since, oh, 2012 or so, when Twitter did the same move to Instagram (remember when Twitter photos used to show up inline and then one day they just stopped?) and started strangling third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific by capping how many users they could have. Twitter has a long, consistent history of being extremely friendly to your app right up until your app gets popular enough to be a threat, and then the API access quietly evaporates. Meerkat built its entire onboarding flow around Twitter's graph. That was always going to be the soft underbelly. Nobody forced them to build it that way, but I get why they did, it's the fastest way to bootstrap a social app from zero users to "instantly has friends," and normally that trade is fine because platforms dont usually yank it out from under you mid-viral-moment out of pure competitive spite.
Whats a little funny about all this is that Periscope isnt even out yet. So for a few days Twitter has actively made its own ecosystem worse — no Meerkat friend graph, no Periscope alternative — purely to protect a product that doesnt exist for the public yet. That's a weirdly aggressive move even by Twitter standards, and I say that as someone who has defended plenty of their platform decisions over the years on this blog. There's a difference between "we're building a competing feature" and "we're going to actively sabotage the guy standing on our lawn while our version is still in the oven."
I keep coming back to this idea that if your product's core mechanic depends entirely on someone else's API staying open, you dont actually own your product. You're renting it, and the landlord can change the locks whenever it's convenient for them. Founders keep learning this lesson and keep building on rented land anyway because the short-term growth hack is too tempting to pass up. I get it. I'd probably do the same thing in their shoes if it meant getting to a million downloads in a week instead of a year. Doesnt make it less of a structural problem though.
Also, small aside, but I cant be the only one a little exhausted by SXSW turning into this yearly ritual where a single app becomes The Story for exactly one week and then mostly evaporates from conversation by April. Last year it was some other thing I dont even remember the name of anymore. The hype cycle at that conference moves so fast it practically laps itself.
Anyway. Meerkat is still working, still livestreaming, still fun to poke around in if you catch someone interesting broadcasting. But the follow-your-friends part is broken now, probably permanently, and that changes the whole feel of the app from "here's what people you know are doing" to "here's a wall of strangers." Curious whether they can build their own graph fast enough to matter before Periscope ships with Twitter's full backing behind it. My guess, and it's just a guess, is no.