Meerkat

» see meerkatapp.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

meerkat launched in late february 2015 and became the breakout app of south by southwest a month later. ben rubin's life on air, inc. had built a tiny ios app that turned your phone into a live broadcast, where anyone with the link could watch you walk through austin in real time. greylock partners put twelve million dollars in within weeks. the press called it the next big thing.

twitter saw the same hype, bought a competing app called periscope, and on march 26, 2015 launched it with full integration into the twitter timeline. the same day, twitter cut meerkat off from its social graph. that was the war over. periscope won not because it was better, but because it was inside the place where livestream links were already being shared.

meerkat survived another year and a half on momentum. on october 4, 2016 the app was withdrawn from the app store and the play store. the company pivoted to a group video chat app called houseparty, which had its own short run before fortnite's owner epic games bought it and then shut it down in 2021.

i never used meerkat. by 2015 i was 31, working as an engineer in turkey, watching the sxsw hype on hacker news from a distance. the whole thing was an american tech-twitter bubble event. it never had a turkish moment. by the time periscope itself reached anyone i knew here, the meerkat name was already a "remember this?" footnote.

~ the dossier ~

~ killed by ~

twitter, on march 26, 2015. periscope launched the same day twitter cut meerkat's access to the social graph. meerkat survived 18 more months on press momentum but the actual platform fight was over inside two weeks of sxsw.

~ what went right ~

the timing of sxsw 2015 was beautiful. meerkat dropped a usable mobile livestream app weeks before the festival, and a few thousand tech people in austin all started using it at once. for one week in march the world looked like meerkat was going to be the next twitter. the funding showed up immediately.

the product was simple. one button to go live, follow people on twitter, watch from the timeline. it had the feel of something genuinely new.

~ what went wrong ~

meerkat depended entirely on twitter to find its audience. when twitter pulled the social graph access on the day periscope launched, the distribution layer was gone. building on top of someone else's social graph is fine until they decide they want that ground for themselves.

there was also no defensible product. periscope shipped the same loop, with replay built in, and twitter put a button right inside the compose flow. meerkat had to keep being a separate app. that does not work when the cost of switching is one tap.

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