Making Meerkats of us all

I am absolutely excited for Meerkat. Like viciously excited. After first hearing about Meerkat on Product Hunt my first thoughts immediately ran to, “Why isn’t this already built into Twitter?”

For those who haven’t heard, Meerkat is an app that allows users to live stream video from their iPhones directly to all of their Twitter followers. The name, according to founder @benrbn, is based off of the sociality that meerkats exhibit. Meerkat allows users to create a stream, similar to services like YouNow or Ustream. The biggest difference being that it creates a 1:1 relationship between Twitter and the stream. You comment on a live stream in Meerkat, it replies to the tweet in which the broadcast was announced. You ‘like’ a stream, it likes the original tweet. You hit “restream” and it retweets the link.

Because all videos are streamed live and users have no direct way to re-watch, this lowers the friction of sharing, knowing that it won’t easily be re-shared. This is a game-changer for users that want to create an instant personal broadcast to all of their followers, without the inconvenience of convincing them to move to another service. Instead of segmenting the conversation, Meerkat allows it to start and continue in the same location: Twitter.

Why didn’t Twitter build this first?

In the most basic thought, Meerkat is simply attaching a live video experience on top of everything else that is already handled by Twitter. Again, why didn’t Twitter build this first? The speed and simplicity in which a user can start a stream within Meerkat is impeccable, and completely removes all obstacles. So many others that have attempted to create this experience rely on the streamer pushing themselves, as well as all potential viewers, onto another service. Meerkat helps strengthen Twitter’s product while also creating it’s own, something that is never easily done when building on top of someone else’s services.

Twitter is the place where live conversation occurs, yet it relies too heavily on external services to create that experience. Text, photo, and the like are all integral pieces of an ever-growing online conversation, and Meerkat enhances that by bringing a live video experience.
Something Twitter should have done long ago.

I can’t wait to see Meerkat’s adoption grow and create streaming meerkats of us all.