I finally got around to actually using Meerkat this weekend, about a week later than everyone else on my Twitter timeline, which is basically my MO with every hyped app. SXSW happened back on the 13th through the 17th, and by the time I downloaded it the app had already peaked, cratered, and turned into a cautionary tale, all inside about two weeks.
If you missed the whole thing: Meerkat is this tiny live-streaming app out of a company called Life On Air, and during SXSW it was the app. Everyone was broadcasting panels, hallway conversations, terrible bar band sets, whatever. It hooked into your Twitter followers to build an audience instantly, which is exactly why it took off so fast and exactly why its in trouble now.
Turns out Twitter had quietly bought a nearly identical app called Periscope back in January, and that deal became public right around the same week Meerkat was blowing up at SXSW, which is a pretty funny coincidence if you squint and a pretty obvious non-coincidence if you dont. Then on the 20th, Twitter cut Meerkat off from the social graph. No more instant follower import, no more "who do I already follow that's on here." New users have to build a following from scratch inside the app now, like its 2009 again.
I dont think this was some shadowy grand plan months in the making. I think its simpler and pettier than that: Twitter owns a rival product now, so why would they keep handing out the API access that made the other guy's product good. Any company would probably do the same thing. Doesnt make it feel less crummy though, especially for an app that was basically the most interesting thing to happen to Twitter in years.
Using it this weekend, the actual streams I caught were rough. Someone filming their cat. A guy narrating a grocery run in what I think was Ohio. A stream that was just static noise for four minutes and somehow had eleven viewers, including me, because I kept waiting for something to happen. The interface is fine, comments scroll up the screen while you watch which is a nice touch, but the whole thing lives and dies on there being anyone worth watching at any given moment, and most of the time there just isnt.
Which is sort of the interesting problem with live video generally. A recorded video only has to be good once. A live stream has to be good right now, continuously, for as long as anyone's watching, and most people are not that interesting for that long. SXSW worked because there was a captive audience of people already doing interesting things in one place for five days. Outside of that its mostly quiet, or its the static-for-four-minutes situation.
I'm annoyed on Meerkat's behalf, mostly because I like watching an underdog get a fair shot and this doesnt feel like one. But I dont think the graph cutoff kills it outright either. The app pulled something like a few hundred thousand signups out of that one week, and momentum like that doesnt evaporate in four days just because onboarding got a little more annoying. People will still install it, theyll still find their friends the old fashioned way, by searching usernames like cavemen.
What I actually want to know is what Twitter's own app, the one they bought, looks like whenever it actually launches. If Periscope ships with a nicer interface and the full graph access that Meerkat just lost, this is over before it starts, and that would be a pretty short reign for the App Store's app of the week. I'll believe its a real fight once both apps are sitting on my home screen at the same time and I have to pick one. Until then I've got Meerkat installed, mostly out of spite, and I'll keep it there until it gives me a reason not to.
One last thing, unrelated: my MacBook Air's battery indicator has been lying to me all week, jumping from 40% straight to 9% with no warning in between. Nothing to do with any of this. Just needed to say it somewhere.