Twitter Plays Hardball With Meerkat

Mat Honan, writing for BuzzFeed:

Twitter is cutting off Meerkat’s ability to port people’s social networks over from Twitter to its own service — the so-called social graph. That means when new users come on board, they will no longer be automatically connected to the other people they are already following on Twitter. This comes not long after Twitter purchased a competing live streaming service, Periscope, and just as the South by Southwest festival is getting underway in Austin.

Sucks for Meerkat, but I can’t blame Twitter.

There’s definitely something going on here — live-streaming video from a mobile device to dozens/hundreds/thousands of your followers is clearly going to be a thing. Meerkat is already existence proof. It’s kind of neat. But they have some serious technology problems. Right now, Meerkat video is on what feels like a 30-second buffer, so the ability for an on-air personality to respond to the comments from viewers suffers from really high latency. It’s like communicating with someone on a spaceship headed to Jupiter. Periscope, from what I’ve heard, only has a few seconds of latency.

★ Saturday, 14 March 2015