Nothing But Meerkat On The Horizon Changing Everything We Thought Was News
Just when we thought the game was over, along comes another killer application called Meerkat, which has taken the Interactive world by storm.
At SXSW this year, Meerkat was by far the buzz subject with the CEO of Mashable at the top of the Meerkat ratings, as he simply walked and talked his way through the SXSW Interactive Festival, streaming his meetings live on Meerkat.
So what is all the fuss about? The technology is not that new, the idea of live streaming has been around for years however Meerkat is that killer application. Meerkat has stormed the walls of the social media giants within a few months of its inception. It is appealing to the super brands, real estate agents, mobile speakers, bloggers and writers alike who have got a tool that allows them to broadcast live with just a smart phone.
“We’ve had the Miami Dolphins, American Idol … everyone using Meerkat. It’s, like, amazing brands are using it, people with access are using it – reporters, schools, churches doing services, real-estate agents doing showings of apartments.”
So what is Meerkat? If your familiar with live-streaming apps then you will have seen the technology before. What Meerkat has added, that makes it so viral, is that stream notification is broadcast immediately to the follower stream on Twitter, making it easy to immediately distribute and build audiences.
The reaction to Meerkat by Twitter was not so friendly, with them immediately restricting Meerkat accessing the full twitter social graph, this coming mere hours after the Twitter giant announced an acquisition of a rival app called Periscope that had been kept under wraps since January.
Twitter’s move to restrict Meerkat has motivated the company to speed up development on new features http://t.co/zHLtPcgZYd by @dmac1
— WSJD (@WSJD) March 16, 2015
The implication of this technology and its application is just emerging. In particular, news agencies and especially journalists are jumping on board with the platform, with the perfect tool to break the news live and show behind-the-scenes life with the swipe of a finger.
The potential of the Meerkat application remain wide open. Meerkat empowers people to broadcast on subjects that are interesting to them, to the whole world. That in itself is groundbreaking technology!
