Meerkat App Brings Livestreaming To Twitter [UPDATE]

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

Meerkat is a new live streaming app which replicates Twitter’s identity, communication and distribution systems.

At any moment you can start a live broadcast on Meerkat which will trigger a tweet of the link into your Twitter stream and send a notification on Twitter to anyone else who may be using the app. Anyone can then tune into the stream on the web or through the Meerkat app and send their comments which are sent as Twitter @ replies.

When you are finished the video will disappear unless you decide to save it to your phone. Meerkat has seen intense popularity in its early days so far and has won a score of praise from some of tech’s online elite.

There have been apps which offer live streaming up until now, Snapchat for instance offers live one-to-one streaming however the consensus seems to be that Meerkat works the best. Meerkat works so well in large part because it is actually built on top of Twitter and mirrors your Twitter graph. This means that anyone you follow or are followed by is automatically connected to you on Meerkat.

The other big positive aspect of Meerket is the fact that it is dead simple to use. There is no complicated setup, no plugins, no addons, Meerkat auto-tweets so you don’t need to promote the live stream. You can schedule a stream for anytime in the next 24 hours or you can hit the button and watch the viewers start to show up.

With Meetkat increasing in popularity the next question is, would Twitter look at acquiring such a platform for themselves? Twitter has had an aggressive policy towards expanding and acquiring startup apps and companies over the past few months, it is quite possible that they will look at making a service such as Meerkat their next move.

You can download Meerkat from the App Store here.

UPDATE – It appears that Twitter has now blocked all outgoing tweets posted via the Meerkat app.

Hi @dickc! today @ 6:30am @twitter blocked all outgoing tweets posted via @appmeerkat even though we work well within the Api -any idea why?

— Ben Rubin (@benrbn) March 2, 2015

About The Author

Mark is the founder of 60 Second Social media where he provides social media news and digital marketing analysis, he is also a proud father of his bearded dragon, Lola. You can follow him on Twitter here. You can also follow 60 Second Social on Twitter here.