So I finally caved and downloaded Periscope this week. It's been sitting in my "apps I should try" mental list since it launched at the end of March, and I kept putting it off because, honestly, watching strangers livestream their lives sounded like a waste of a Saturday. Turns out it kind of is, and I don't regret it at all.
Quick background for anyone who's been ignoring their Twitter feed: Twitter bought this little startup called Periscope before it had even shipped a product, reportedly for something like $100 million, and then let it launch as its own app in late March. Meanwhile there's this other app, Meerkat, that had already blown up huge at SXSW in mid-March, like, the app of the conference, the thing every tech reporter was gushing about. Then Twitter cut off Meerkat's access to the social graph (no more "who do I already follow" auto-import) right around the same time, which a lot of people read as Twitter basically strangling a competitor in its crib to clear room for its own thing. Whether that's fair or not I dont know, but the timing was not subtle.
Anyway. I opened Periscope Thursday night expecting to feel nothing, and instead spent forty-five minutes watching a guy in what I'm pretty sure was Ohio assemble an IKEA bookshelf while narrating his frustration with the little wooden dowel pins. No music, bad lighting, phone propped against a lamp. There were maybe sixty people watching and half of them were just typing "lol" every time he dropped the Allen wrench. I have no explanation for why this held my attention the way it did. It shouldn't have. But there's something about watching someone do a completely unremarkable task, live, with zero editing, that feels different from a YouTube video in a way I'm still trying to put my finger on. It's less a performance and more like you accidentally wandered into someone's garage.
The hearts thing is a little much though — you tap the screen and little pink hearts float up like it's a Snapchat filter, and during any stream with more than a few hundred viewers the screen just fills up with pink and you cant see anything else. I get why they did it, it's a cheap engagement signal, but it's visually obnoxious.
What I actually think is interesting here isnt the app itself, its the timing. Twitter's been getting hammered for over a year now about slowing user growth and not having a clear "next thing," and live video is obviously their bet at grabbing some of that energy back. Whether Periscope turns into an actual habit for people the way, say, checking Instagram is, I genuinely dont know yet. Live content is a weird ask. You have to be there, in the moment, or it's gone (well, replays exist for 24 hours, but thats not really the point of the format). That's a much bigger commitment than scrolling a feed whenever you feel like it.
I also tried broadcasting myself, briefly, mostly to see how it worked. Three people watched me sit at my kitchen table doing basically nothing, and one of them left a comment asking if I was okay, which, fair, I probably did look a little unwell under my kitchen light. I ended the stream after about four minutes out of pure secondhand embarrassment for myself. Not for me, at least not yet. Ask me again in a year.
Side note, completely unrelated: my upstairs neighbor has started running what sounds like a treadmill at 6am every single day and I would like to formally complain about this in writing, here, on my own blog, because there's nowhere else to put it. That's it. That's the complaint. Carry on.
Anyway if you haven't tried Periscope or Meerkat yet, it's worth five minutes just to see what live mobile video looks like when it's not a news network doing it — messy, unpolished, occasionally someone's cat walks through frame and ruins the shot. I dont know if it sticks around in this exact form, but the underlying idea, that everyone's phone is now also a broadcast camera, feels like the kind of thing that doesn't really go away once it exists. Somebody's always going to want to show you their IKEA bookshelf.