So SXSW wrapped up almost a week ago now and the thing everybody in my Twitter feed is still fighting about isn't a movie premiere or a panel about wearables, its an app called Meerkat. If you haven't run into it yet: you open it, you tap "stream," and suddenly anyone following you on Twitter gets a notification that you're live. No editing, no filters, just whatever your phone camera happens to be pointed at. People were using it to broadcast lines at food trucks, hotel hallway conversations, random band soundchecks. Genuinely dumb a lot of the time. Also kind of magnetic, in the way live TV used to be before we all had 400 channels and stopped caring what was "on right now."
I downloaded it the second week of March because three separate people I follow wouldn't shut up about it, and I get the appeal. Watching a stream and typing comments that scroll up the screen while the person on camera reacts in real time is a different kind of experience than a tweet or a photo. It's a little bit live theater and a little bit rubbernecking. My battery hated it though — twenty minutes of streaming and my phone was warm enough to fry an egg on, which, fine, early app, I'll allow it some slack.
Heres the part thats actually annoying. Twitter bought a company called Periscope back in the middle of March, before Periscope had even launched publicly, for something like a hundred million dollars depending on which report you believe. Periscope does basically the same thing Meerkat does. And then this week, right as Meerkat was riding the biggest wave of attention it's ever going to get, Twitter cut off its access to the social graph. Meaning: Meerkat can no longer look at who you follow on Twitter and suggest you follow the same people on Meerkat. New users now land in an empty app with nobody to watch and nobody watching them.
I dont think this is some shocking new low for Twitter, because they've pulled this exact move before. Remember when Instagram photos stopped showing up inline in tweets back in 2012? Same playbook, different app on the receiving end. Twitter owns the graph, so Twitter gets to decide who's allowed to use it, and when a competitor is about to launch its own version of the thing you're benefiting from, well, guess what happens to your API access. Its not against the rules. Its just kind of gross to watch happen to a team that, as far as I can tell, built something people actually wanted to use, three weeks before the biggest tech gathering of the year, and then got the rug pulled the moment it started working.
What bugs me more than the business logic is the timing. If Twitter wanted to protect Periscope they could've done this quietly in January before anyone had heard of Meerkat. Instead they let Meerkat blow up at SXSW, soak up every write-up from every outlet covering the festival, and then yanked the ladder away right after. Feels less like protecting a product and more like watching a smaller company do your market research for free and then closing the door once you've seen what works.
None of this is a huge shock if you've paid attention to how platforms behave once they're big enough that "the graph" is a strategic asset instead of just a feature. Facebook's done it. Twitter's done it. I'd bet money whoever ends up dominant in whatever comes after apps does it too. Doesn't make it less annoying when it happens to something you were actually enjoying using, though. I kept Meerkat on my phone for now, mostly out of stubbornness, but I'd be lying if I said I expect it to still be relevant come summer. Periscope hasn't even shipped yet and it's already winning by default, which is its own kind of depressing if you think about it for more than a few seconds.
Anyway. If you were at SXSW and streamed something dumb on Meerkat this month, send me the link, I want to see it before the whole thing quietly dies.