So this happened last week and I've been stewing on it since: Twitter quietly cut Meerkat off from its social graph. If you don't know what that means in practice, it's this — when Meerkat first launched back in late February, you could sign in with your Twitter account and it would automatically show you which of your Twitter friends were already on there and let you follow them in one tap. That's gone now. As of a few days ago, new users get dumped into the app with zero connections and have to find people the old-fashioned way, by hunting down usernames one at a time like it's 2009.
I've been using Meerkat since right around SXSW, which is honestly the only reason I even know what it is. I was down in Austin for a work thing (not officially covering the festival, just tagging along with a friend who had a badge) and every single person under thirty had this app open, broadcasting lines outside taco trucks and panel Q&As to a couple hundred strangers. It's a genuinely fun idea — you hit record, it blasts out to your followers, and the second you stop, the video is just gone. No archive, no editing, no do-over. There's something kind of freeing about that compared to, I don't know, agonizing over an Instagram caption for ten minutes.
Anyway, the timing here is not subtle. Twitter announced it was buying Periscope on March 13th, before Periscope had even launched publicly, reportedly for somewhere north of $100 million. Meerkat was the one everybody was already using and talking about, so twelve days later Twitter goes and disables the exact feature that made Meerkat useful on day one. I don't think you need a media studies degree to connect those dots.
What actually annoys me isn't even the business logic. I get it, a platform doesn't owe a rival app free access to its data forever, and Twitter's API terms always said this kind of thing could happen. Fine. What bugs me is how familiar the pattern is. Twitter has done versions of this before to other apps that leaned too hard on the follow graph, and every time it happens there's this brief round of "well that's just how platforms work" acceptance and then everyone moves on. Meerkat reportedly had something like 300,000 signups by the time this went down, most of them in the last three or four weeks. That's a real user base built almost entirely on top of Twitter's plumbing, and Twitter just pulled the plumbing out.
I tried Meerkat again this morning just to see what the actual experience is like now, post-cutoff. It still works fine as a broadcast tool. You can still post the link to your Twitter feed so followers know you're live. But the onboarding is noticeably worse, and I have to imagine that matters a lot for an app whose whole value proposition is "everyone's already here." New users showing up to an empty room is not a good look, no matter how slick the actual streaming quality is.
Small tangent, but this whole saga also reminded me how much I hate live-streaming as a spectator experience on a bad connection. I was trying to watch a friend's Meerkat stream from a coffee shop yesterday and the wifi there is genuinely terrible, it buffers on literally everything, and half the stream was just a frozen frame of someone's chin. Not Meerkat's fault, to be clear. But it's a good reminder that "live" only feels magical when the network underneath it actually cooperates, and most of us are still on networks that don't.
Periscope hasn't even launched to the public yet as of today, so there's no real head-to-head to judge. But it's obvious which one Twitter wants to win, and it's not the one it just made harder to use. I'll probably keep poking at Meerkat for a while out of stubbornness more than anything, but I wouldn't bet on it being the one people are still talking about by summer. Platforms tend to win these fights eventually, even the boring, unglamorous way, by just quietly turning off a switch.