Some Perspective on Twitter vs. Meerkat
I love Twitter.
So far I’m loving Meerkat, too. It’s brand new but the enthusiasm that’s been seen for such an early product is truly awesome. I ran a VC AMA (ask me anything) last Monday on Meerkat and had > 1,000 simultaneous people asking me questions. The energy was electric so I’m going to do it again this coming week.
You may have read that Twitter has now made it harder for Meerkat to operate. As a user I felt immediately frustrated by this move and said so, in stead wishing that Twitter would win based on innovation.
If Twitter believes @periscopeco is a better product why not just try to win on that basis? They already have home court advantage
— Mark Suster (@msuster) March 14, 2015
But the beautiful thing about Twitter in the first place — a bit like the beauty of democracy itself — is that it lets you spout off your opinion and then watch it debated in the public square. And on reflection I have slightly more balanced views. For me that’s a win. So here is the conclusion I’ve come to:
1. I’m rooting for Meerkat to succeed as an independent network
The energy created by livestream video is awesome. For years when I recorded my YouTube show “This Week in VC” (now BothSides TV) one of the most magic parts was the people who watched the show live and could ask questions in realtime. It created an energy on the show that doesn’t exist without it. Modern livestreaming of video takes this energy one step further due to the raw nature of filming & consuming on mobile. When I watch (or am watched) on Meerkat it feels a bit like a group Facetime session. It’s very intimate.
The group of people I might communicate with in a network like this might be different than the people with whom I interact on Twitter so my initial thought is that building a network outside of Twitter would be useful to me in the way I have built a separate audience in YouTube. And in general I like to see new products and new companies emerge because the market competition / dynamics drives innovation in the first place. That’s why I’m rooting for Meerkat.
2. Twitter was right to make the changes they made to how Meerkat uses their “social graph”
What did Twitter actually do?
For starters they made it impossible to export one’s “social graph” to Meerkat. The importance of social-graph portability is that once I’m using a new product if I can port my followers and whom I’m following, I instantly am following people I know and people who want to follow me can easily follow me. It’s zero friction. I have 200,000 followers on Twitter but only 4,000 on Instagram (maybe I post too many kid pictures there :). But I think the bigger reason is that it’s harder to find me on Instagram and if a social-graph port were possible I would interact with way more people on Instagram.
Some smart people whom I like & respect started to weigh in publicly on the debate of Meerkat vs. Twitter. These are people who are know are fans of Meerkat
@msuster fan of both Meerkat & Periscope. IMO what Twitter did is defensible. surprised they haven’t also stopped comment = @ reply tweet.
— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) March 14, 2015
1/ graphs are power and major enterprise value. What Twitter did to @AppMeerkat was smart — and unusual for them to do to an early app
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) March 14, 2015
2/ it shows how big the opportunity for live video, and owning the “go live now” network can be. And so powerful with Twitter. Exciting time
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) March 14, 2015
I also got some DMs from friends I respect also weighing in privately with the view that “Twitter had not choice.” So this made me think twice about what the rational vs. emotional Mark Suster really thought.
Should third-party apps be able to port my social graph and then drag audiences to consume in a new location?
As a user — yes. As a business — no. Of course it’s better for me as a user and I could argue it’s MY social graph. But it’s not really. I built my graph on a platform I’m able to use for free by a company that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building the product so in reality my graph within Twitter is really part of their IP. For the most part Twitter is benevolent in the way Google is. They allow my to drive traffic to my blog, to websites or to anywhere I want as long as the audience will click on the links I share. That’s how Google became Google — by driving traffic.
But my social graph within any network (Twitter, YouTube) is just the top end of my user funnel and I need to convince audiences who visit my blog to sign up for my newsletter to have a “direct” relationship with them. That’s actually pretty fair.
(In fact, you can sign up right below for my newsletter if you haven’t — just click the link please! And Twitter made that easy, so thank you, Twitter!).
I have a couple posts queued up for next week — get them in your inbox https://t.co/YnJM8aeru9
— Mark Suster (@msuster) November 7, 2014
As a business I wouldn’t say Twitter needs to allow third-parties to port social graphs. When you look at it — Twitter hasn’t stopped Meerkat from integrating with the service provided Meerkat does it in a way that Twitter doesn’t consider overtly hostile to their interests. Twitter still allows you to Tweet your upcoming Meerkat sessions, they allow you to put a link in your Tweet to drive traffic and they allow you to put a #Meerkat hashtag to easily find Meerkat sessions.
So on reflection while my consumer instincts were disappointed I think others were more right than I was in their conclusions about the business decision Twitter made. And you could argue perhaps Twitter could have cut off Meerkat even earlier.
3. Meerkat pushed the limits and benefitted from this early behavior
The fact that Meerkat pushed the limits by porting social graphs paid off. My phone has been ringing off the hook with notifications of others starting “Meerkasts” and these are not people who I actively went and found in Meerkat but rather people I followed on Twitter. So this aggressive move by Meerkat paid off and when you think about it that’s the message that Twitter as a business needs to make clear, “It’s not ok to port the social graph if you’re going to be a third-party developer.”
If you’re anything like me and if you haven’t turned off Meerkat notifications your home screen has looked something like the photo above for the past week. I didn’t proactively follow any of these people on Meerkat — I follow them on Twitter. Yet now I’m getting direct notifications from Meerkat to drive me to their app based on my Twitter social graph.
If the future will be more difficult to draft off of platform social graphs, what should startup developer do?
Many people in the industry know this but in case you aren’t one of them: The smartest move in 2015 is to find the right opportunity to ask the user for their mobile phone number. If they authorize you to use this number and give you access to your contact list (aka name & address book) then you have the ability to auto-match other users who sign up. The best mobile companies do this. And of course you can encourage your early advocate users to invite their friends through SMS but you just need to be careful not to cross the line into either annoyingly spammy or in some cases illegal text-messaging spam.
4. Meerkat went a bit too far in driving the conversation into Twitter
There is one area that stood out for me in even the earliest instances as being wrong and that was Meerkat pushing conversations that happened in Meerkat into Twitter. So @messages would appear in my Twitter stream that were totally out of context because they were based on conversations happening with Meerkat. This is bad for both user behavior and for Twitter etiquette — even if it drove more traffic.
Why is it wrong?
As a user if Meerkat I don’t want every comment I make in the app to be pushed into Twitter as a breadcrumb. The comments are out of context and in the wrong network and any rationale given I can only say that the intent is to drive more traffic. Every Meerkat session I’ve commented in I’ve immediately gone to Twitter afterwards and deleted my comments. As a network Twitter has worked hard to keep the quality of its stream high without building an algorithm to overly control what goes in the stream like Facebook does with Edgerank. If you suddenly have out-of-context @messages in Twitter from a 3rd-party app you could see why they would want to clamp down on apps that did this.
So put simply:
“What happens in Meerkat, stays in Meerkat”
5. Sometimes the platform can be right about their business but the market loses
Ultimately I think the platform (Twitter) was right in their actions even though I as a user may not benefit. It’s the Instagram / Twitter problem. I’d love to be able to auto publish my Instagram photos into Twitter and it annoys me that I have to upload pictures twice to push them into two networks. But I understand Twitter’s rationale.
The lover of new products & innovation in me was disappointed by Twitter’s actions. But as I think more broadly about markets and market behavior I think Twitter got it right for their business even if it’s not the personal outcome I wanted. And I have my social network in Twitter to thank for the public debate that clarified my thinking on this topic =. I hope I’ve been able to help you a little bit, too.
I’m still long Meerkat and can’t wait to run another AMA next week. I hope you’ll tune in and we can discuss this very topic.
So what do you think?
