So this week gave us a pretty good look at what happens when a giant platform decides it doesn't like the app that's suddenly more interesting than its own product. Meerkat, the livestreaming app that blew up out of nowhere at SXSW a few weeks back, got its access to Twitter's social graph cut off. That happened right around March 27th or so. If you open Meerkat now it can't pull in who you already follow on Twitter anymore, which sounds like a small technical thing until you realize it's the entire reason the app spread so fast in the first place. No more instant list of people to watch. You start from zero.
Meanwhile Periscope, which Twitter bought back in March before it had even launched publicly, went live on its own on March 26th, fully wired into Twitter, no friction at all. Funny how that timing worked out.
I've had both installed on my phone for about a week now and I'll just say it plainly: I like Periscope more, and I think Meerkat is in real trouble. Periscope has this replay feature where you can watch a broadcast after it happened, which sounds obvious in hindsight but Meerkat doesn't do it (streams just vanish when they end), and that one feature alone makes Periscope feel like an actual product instead of a stunt. Meerkat still has this raw, chaotic energy to it though, more people just yelling into their phones from parking lots, which is kind of the whole appeal honestly. I don't think chaos is a durable business strategy against a company that owns the follow graph you need to survive.
What bugs me is how nakedly obvious the move was. Twitter didn't build a better livestreaming app first and let it win on merit, it bought a competitor pre-launch and then choked off the upstart's oxygen supply the moment the upstart got popular enough to matter. That's not exactly new behavior for a big platform (ask anyone who built a business on the old Twitter API around 2012), but watching it happen in real time to an app I'd actually been using for two weeks felt different than reading about it after the fact. Meerkat's CEO Ben Rubin posted something defiant about it, said they'd keep building, and I hope he's right, but "keep building" is what everyone says right before they quietly pivot into something else entirely.
Anyway. Battery life on both apps is rough if you're actually watching more than ten minutes of stream, my phone was down to 40% by 2pm yesterday after checking in on maybe three different broadcasts over lunch, one of which was just a guy in what looked like Austin walking around narrating nothing in particular. I don't know why I watched the whole thing. That's sort of the trap with these apps, there's no real reason to keep watching except that it might become something.
Small detour because I have to mention it: yesterday was April 1st and Google did the Pac-Man thing in Google Maps again, where you can turn basically any street layout into a playable Pac-Man maze right from the map. I lost a genuinely embarrassing chunk of my afternoon turning my own neighborhood into a maze and dying immediately because the ghosts spawn right next to a cul-de-sac near my house. My coworker turned the office parking lot into one and got a surprisingly high score, enough that he wouldn't shut up about it for the rest of the day. It's a dumb joke that Google has basically nailed two years running now, and I say that as someone who's usually annoyed by April Fools tech gimmicks. Most of them aren't funny, they're just a company reminding you it exists. This one's actually fun to use for five minutes, which is more than I can say for whatever fake product Google's "brand team" cooked up on 2013's list of jokes I can't even remember anymore.
Back to livestreaming though, because I think it's the more interesting story long term. Somebody's going to figure out what these apps are actually for beyond novelty, whether that's news, sports, concerts nobody could get tickets to, or something nobody's thought of yet. Right now it mostly feels like watching people watch other people, which is a strange loop to be inside of at 1am on a Wednesday, but I've done it three nights running so apparently it works on me regardless of what I think about it on principle.