So SXSW wrapped up almost a week ago now and my Twitter timeline is finally starting to calm down, but I want to talk about the one thing that actually stuck with me from the whole circus: Meerkat.
If you weren't paying attention, Meerkat is this dead-simple livestreaming app that basically nobody had heard of until a couple weeks ago, and then suddenly everyone at SXSW was holding their phone up filming panels and parties and, I kid you not, someone streamed themselves waiting in line for tacos for like twenty minutes. I downloaded it out of curiosity on a Tuesday and by that Friday I'd used it maybe four times and already had opinions.
Here's the thing nobody tells you going in: the app is rough. It logs you in through Twitter (that's actually the whole point, more on that in a second), and the first stream I watched buffered so badly I gave up after ninety seconds. My own attempt at streaming, I tried filming my walk to get coffee, incredibly riveting content I know, ate about 15% of my battery in eleven minutes. Eleven minutes! I wasn't even trying to be interesting.
But here's what makes this actually a story instead of just "app has bugs, more at 11": Twitter cut Meerkat off. Right in the middle of SXSW, while the app was having its whole main character moment, Twitter yanked Meerkat's access to the social graph, meaning new users couldn't see which of their Twitter friends were already on the app. That's a pretty brutal move to pull during launch week of the one conference that exists specifically for launching things.
And then, almost the same day, word got out that Twitter had bought a company called Periscope for something like $100 million, before Periscope had even launched publicly. Periscope does basically the exact same thing Meerkat does. So the sequence of events is: watch a scrappy startup catch fire at the exact conference built for catching fire, quietly own its future competitor already, then cut the startup off at the knees using your own platform as leverage. I've read takes calling this ruthless and takes calling it just smart business, and honestly I think it's both. Doesn't make it less shady.
What I keep coming back to is how fast the whole thing moved. Two weeks ago basically nobody outside a few tech blogs knew what Meerkat was. Now it's the thing every panel at SXSW was talking about, its founder was doing press nonstop, and it's already fighting for its life against a company that can turn off the lights whenever it wants. That's an insane compression of an entire startup lifecycle, launch, hype, existential threat, into maybe two weeks.
I don't think Meerkat is going to just die, for what it's worth. People are stubborn about whatever app they downloaded first, and there's something to be said for being early even when you're bug-riddled and under attack. But I'm not going to pretend I'm rooting for it because I'm in love with the product itself. I'm rooting for it because I like watching a scrappier company get punched and refuse to fall down, which, look, is a pretty irrational reason to root for a company, but here we are.
One small complaint while I'm at it: the notification situation on this thing is a mess right now. Meerkat blasts a push notification to your entire follower list the second you go live, no cooldown, no batching, nothing. I streamed for four minutes on Sunday testing something and apparently pinged something like sixty people straight onto their lock screens. A couple of them texted me actual "why did you do this to me" messages. Sorry, everyone.
If you've got five minutes and a decent connection it's worth opening the app once just to feel what a livestream that vanishes forever the second you close it is like. It's a weirder experience than a YouTube video, in a way I haven't quite pinned down yet. I'll probably write more about this once Periscope is actually out and I can put them side by side properly.