Meerkat Strikes Back At Periscope With New Ways To Follow

Tech Titans Blast New Anti-Gay Law In IndianaWith Twitter’s much more polished live-streaming app Periscope now on the market, Meerkat needs to strengthen its own social graph to keep users from straying to its new competitor. So today Meerkat for iOS was updated with recommendations of people to follow, a way to follow people from inside streams, and ways to discover streams your friends like. It’s also trying to neutralize some Periscope talking points like Meerkat being too publicly chatty by letting users opt out of syndicating their comments to Twitter.
Meerkat founder Ben Rubin tells me the features are designed “to overcome the fact that we don’t have access to users’ Twitter social graph. This is just the first step. :) ”
Periscope and Meerkat have some distinct differences, like Periscope’s optional replays and private streams versus Meerkat’s always-public forced ephemerality. Still, they’re definitely fighting for a similar audience.
Screenshots from Periscope show me live-streaming the Omnibang from F8 on the left, and Vine star Rudy Mancuso getting flooded with hearts and comments while Periscoping with Shots founder John Shahidi on the right,
Periscope is largely thought to be a better product, with design flourishes and extra features. But as we saw with Facebook’s attempt to clone Snapchat with the more full-featured Poke, it’s a lot easier to build functionality than community.
Periscope could have run away with the live-streaming race if it had only launched a month ago. Instead, Meerkat burst on the scene and built an early user base of techies, plus some web stars and legitimate celebrities. It quickly became synonymous with real-time, mobile live streaming.
Yet Periscope was building community, too, just more stealthily. It was in beta testing for months with top Silicon Valley founders and investors before launching yesterday. Thanks to its acquisition by Twitter, it got access to a prestigious network of early adopters.
Periscope also got help from Twitter’s VIP relations team. I’ve heard that the same squad tasked with getting top celebrities to tweet incessantly was also helping get Periscope into the right hands. And the rumor according to one source is that Twitter was actively telling celebrities not to use Meerkat and wait for Periscope to come out over the last few weeks.
Yahoo reports that stars like Sophia Bush, Mark Cuban, Al Roker and iJustine were all on the beta. Already, a ton of social media stars like John Shahidi, Rudy Mancuso, King Bach, and Lele Pons are appearing in Periscopes. Whichever app recruits these new media celebrities with massive followings could in turn sign up their legions of fans.
Here’s a video demo of how Periscope works
Now, Meerkat is scrambling to rebuild itself as an app separate from Twitter. Originally, Meerkat relied entirely on Twitter for its identity, link distribution and communication systems. Then, two weeks ago, Twitter cut off Meerkat’s ability to let users auto-follow everyone they follow on Twitter.
Before, Meerkat could just piggyback on Twitter’s discovery features, but now it needs its own way for people to find who to follow, hence today’s update.

The question is whether Meerkat has built a stable and loyal enough social graph that it can survive competition from a more refined live-streaming app backed by Twitter. Periscope has made remarkable gains in terms of community over the last 36 hours. At this rate, Periscope could run wild while caging Meerkat as just an app for Twitter-haters.
Each day, the momentum behind mobile live streaming as a new creation canvas builds. While plenty called Meerkat a fad when it first launched, the ability to instantly peer through someone else’s eyes seems to have enduring value. The fate of this re-emerging medium could be decided in the coming weeks.

By: Unknown On 11:36

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The Moment I Knew Twitter Had To Buy Periscope

The Internet Is Flat, Now What?Editor’s note: Shane Mac is the CEO of Assist.
I’ve been using Periscope for about five months. I would run into the team almost daily at a coffee shop, and since we were both in pre-launch building mode, watching their team grow as they built their product was inspiring.
It was Wednesday, January 28, when I saw exactly what Periscope would mean for Twitter users. I had decided to take an old college friend and his father to dinner in the Mission in San Francisco. The kind of friend who is a small-town boy and always tells me he doesn’t understand all this tech stuff.
As we sat on the rooftop having a Tecate, my phone buzzed. Our reservation was ready next door. We headed down the elevator, and the moment we walked out the front door, something wasn’t right.
I heard sirens roaring down the street. The smell of smoke was thick. When I looked up, the entire corner building was raging in flames. I then realized that I was the first person on the scene. By accident. Fire trucks started pulling up and immediately were sending ladders to the roof.
The only thing that crossed my mind was: I have to share what’s happening.
So I opened Periscope.Watching what happened next, both on my phone from the Periscope community to the firefighters directly above me was one of the most intense moments I’ve ever had.
The way the firefighters were trying to get to the top floor where the smoke was completely black made me believe someone was still in there. I zoomed in. A fully masked man standing on the end of the ladder screaming back at his crew to bring him a ladder so he could climb through a flaming window.
Then he jumped through the window and disappeared into the smoke. The intensity grew and more men ran up the ladder screaming words I could barely understand. Ashes and pieces of the building started falling on top of me.
I just kept filming. Because in my hand something else had been happening.Kayvon Beykpour, the co-founder of Periscope, decided to invite his followers to watch the broadcast. Then another Periscope team member did. Then others followed suit. Within 30 seconds, there were 50 people watching this happen right from my hand. Jack Dorsey asked a question. I saw Ev Williams join. Chase Jarvis decided to jump into the conversation. A few people I had never met were reminding me to be safe.
The interesting thing was that no news crew was on the scene yet; it was just me and my phone. Moreover, no TV camera has a live feedback channel where people can support and ask questions directly to the broadcaster. I was answering everyone’s questions in real time.
We are eight minutes in to the Periscope and 50-plus people are watching. I can’t stop filming now. As Chase Jarvis once told me, in bad situations you have an obligation to shoot.
My eyes are moving from the comments on my screen, the ashes falling on my head, to the firefighters racing up the ladder. Something doesn’t feel right. Somebody is still inside, you can just tell from the urgency to get in this one window.
I keep filming. My hands start to shake. More questions start rolling onto my screen. Then we hear the saw start. Another group of firefighters were trying to cut through the roof.
After about 10 minutes, the flames start to subside and the commotion is settling down. The news trucks start to arrive and there’s a helicopter now flying overhead. But it is already over.
I headed to dinner with my friend and his father. A friend and his dad who never understood why or when to use Twitter knew exactly why someone would use Periscope. It just made sense to them.
I don’t know what Twitter paid for Periscope but it doesn’t matter. Periscope truly allows people to share “what’s happening” and that’s all that matters. You could build this on top of Twitter but the truth is that it needs to be its own platform for everyone else in the world who doesn’t get Twitter.
That evening, while sitting alone having a cocktail, I finally heard the news. A lady had died in the fire. She was trapped on the top floor. I started crying. I’ve never felt the emotion that poured over me at that moment. I felt as if I should have been able to do something since I was there. But I couldn’t.
That moment was when I realized that Periscope isn’t just another social media app; it literally changes how I, and everyone else, can see the world. There’s nothing else like it.

By: Unknown On 10:23

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