So I spent most of the last two weeks with Meerkat open on my phone, watching random people livestream themselves eating tacos at SXSW, and now Twitter's gone and strangled it. Real classy timing too, right after the app was the entire story of the festival.
Quick recap in case you missed the whole thing: Meerkat is this dead-simple livestreaming app, you hit go, it tweets a link, anyone following you can watch live and comment, and the video just vanishes when you're done. No archive, no editing, nothing. It came out of nowhere in late February, and by the time SXSW rolled around in Austin last week it was THE app everyone was demoing on stage and complaining about over drinks. I don't even go to SXSW and I was seeing it everywhere on my timeline.
The catch, and the thing that should have been obvious from day one, is that Meerkat runs entirely on Twitter's plumbing. It uses your Twitter followers as your Meerkat followers. That's the whole trick: zero cold start, you open the app and you already have an audience because your audience already exists on Twitter. Which is great until Twitter notices and decides it would rather you not build a hit product on top of its social graph for free.
And that's basically what happened this week. Twitter cut Meerkat off from the follower/following API, so new users can't auto-import their Twitter graph into the app anymore. Officially it's "enforcing developer rules," but come on. Twitter had already bought Periscope, a nearly identical livestreaming app that hadn't even launched yet, for a reported sum north of $100 million. So they killed the competitor's oxygen supply a few days before shipping their own version of the same idea. I don't think that's some shocking revelation of corporate ruthlessness, it's just funny how see-through it is.
If this feels familiar, it's because Twitter did almost the exact same move to Instagram back in 2012, right after Facebook bought Instagram — yanked the "Find Friends" integration so Instagram users couldn't easily find their Twitter friends inside the app anymore. I remember writing about that here at the time and thinking it was a little petty. Three years later, same playbook, different app. At some point you have to admire the consistency even if you don't admire the behavior.
My actual experience using Meerkat, for what it's worth: it's rough. The notifications are relentless: every single person you follow who goes live pings you, and if you follow more than a couple dozen people that's your phone buzzing constantly for two-minute videos of someone's hotel room ceiling. The video quality is patchy depending on wifi, there's no way to save a stream once it's over which is charming in theory and annoying in practice when you actually wanted to rewatch something, and the whole thing feels like it was built in about three weeks, because it probably was.
None of that means it isn't a genuinely interesting idea. Live, ephemeral, no-pressure video from your phone is a real category and somebody was always going to nail the format eventually. I just don't think it's this exact app, in this exact state, and I definitely don't think it survives long term without Twitter's blessing now that Twitter has decided the blessing is over. Periscope hasn't even shipped yet as I'm writing this, so we'll see if Twitter's in-house version is actually better or just better-connected.
Also, small aside, but Twitter turned nine years old this week too (the first tweet was posted back on March 21, 2006, some guy named Jack tweeting "just setting up my twttr"), which makes the timing even more on the nose — nine years in and the company's defining move is still "identify the thing built on top of us that's working, then take away the part that made it work."
Anyway. Download Meerkat now if you're curious, before the follower-import thing matters less and less every day it's broken. It's still fun for exactly as long as your battery lasts.