Incomparable Meerkat

MEERKATS are small, burrowing animals that spend much of their time socialising while sheltering from the heat of the sun. They are not unlike those uber-geeks who migrate each year to Austin, Texas, for the South by South-West Interactive Festival (SXSW), where they partake in similar rituals. Apart from partying after the sun goes down, the main purpose of those attending is to promote their latest start-ups, while seeking to catch the eye of investors.

Occasionally, it works. Twitter, the social-networking service that lets users dispense wisdom in 140 characters, made its debut at SXSW in 2007. Foursquare, a mobile app for local search and discovery, was the festival buzz of 2012. This year, the social-media fad is a mobile app for streaming live video. Appropriately, the new iPhone-only app is called Meerkat.

There is nothing new about broadcasting live video to friends, family, associates or even strangers. Ustream has made a successful business out of it. YouTube now has a live video feature of its own. Skype bought live video-sharing app Qik in 2011. Its main competitor, ooVoo, is another serious contender in the video-chatting space. Vine, which lets users share short video clips, was acquired by Twitter in 2012. Snapchat has since added video to its own ephemeral photo messaging service. The same goes for Instagram, now owned by Facebook. Twitch, with an audience bigger than all but Netflix, Google, Amazon and Apple, offers live video streams of people playing video games—so successfully that Amazon bought the company last year for $970m (see “Streaming down the Amazon”, August 30th 2014).

What makes Meerkat special? For one thing, being tightly integrated with Twitter, Meerkat requires little effort to sign on to (provided users already have a Twitter account). For another, working so closely with Twitter, every live video stream a user “meercasts” gets tweeted automatically to that person’s followers on Twitter. The user sees tiny profile pictures of those watching the video stream, along with tweets they may make about it. The whole experience is immediate and engaging.

Therein lies the source of the past week’s kerfuffle. Having seen Meerkat sign up over 100,000 users since going live in late February, Twitter suddenly became apprehensive. Until then, it had helped Meerkat’s developers build their application on top of Twitter—as it encourages all developers to do, in order to bring in yet more traffic.

But once Meerkat looked a runaway success in its own right, Twitter promptly pulled the plug. On March 13th, with no more than two hours’ notice, Twitter announced that Meerkat could no longer have access to its social graph—ie, the details of its users, along with their relationships with one another. Henceforth, Meerkat would have to develop its own network of users, though they will be able to carry on posting their video streams on Twitter. But Meerkat will no longer be able to push notifications announcing live happenings automatically to its followers on Twitter. That is a big blow to it.

Meanwhile, Twitter has announced that it has acquired a live video-streaming service of its own, called Periscope. This is clearly a means to ward off Meerkat’s sudden threat. Meerkat has since moved quickly to build its own social graph—by updating its app with an ability to search for people who may wish to follow its users’ meercasts. Even so, the start-up’s future is no longer as rosy as before.

While grateful to Twitter for helping Meerkat get up and running, Ben Rubin, the firm’s co-founder and chief executive, reckons Facebook could offer much in Twitter’s absence. Critics note, however, that Meerkat’s strength is its immediacy and ephemerality (it does not archive any of its users’ video streams). But because of Facebook’s size as the world’s largest social network, only one user in eight manages to view a friend’s post within 24 hours, Mr Rubin says. That would be the kiss of death for Meerkat.

Bystanders believe Meerkat could yet find a role for itself among sports fans wishing to broadcast games to friends—though to do so, the iPhone would need a far longer lens than it has at present. Others think Meerkat would be ideal for citizen-journalists wanting to disseminate news events and atrocities. Most likely, however, it will be amateur pornographers who make best use of Meerkat’s special features. They have a long history of kick-starting new video technologies.