The Magic Moment of Meerkat
Ok. If you work in tech this week you’ve no doubt heard much of this new app called Meerkat.
In case you’ve spent the week living under a rock, Meerkat is an app integrated (currently) with Twitter in which if you click on the link of somebody who shares a “Meerkat Stream” you will be transported into a live session of their phone streaming. You can also watch in the Meerkat app linked above and participate in a realtime conversation with other people in that particular stream.
Meerkat is magical.
Let me get this out of the way: I’m not an investor in Meerkat. And given how quick Silicon Valley throws money at people at things that have rapid and massive adoption (Turntable.fm, Yo!, Ello, Secret, etc) I am not likely to become an investor. I state that so you can take what I say next a little bit more seriously.
People are addicted to the experience in a way I haven’t seen since the early days of Twitter or Quora. Now, I’m not saying that it will last, I’m not saying that there aren’t other alternatives, I’m not saying that Twitter won’t try to squash them for riding on their back of their social graph. Or SnapChat won’t compete and ephemeral video them. And of course this type of product has existing before. We met with the team at Qik years ago who tried to do this on Nokia phones but the timing wasn’t right. And Meerkat stands on the shoulders of other great innovators like Justin.tv and ustream.
But I am willing to say right now that this Meerkat thing is a phenomenon and it’s magical.
Of course I spotted it early like many because I noticed people I’ve long followed like Ryan Hoover, Danielle Morrill at Matt Mazzeo somewhat obsessed with it. And if I have my story straight it’s been live for less than 2 weeks.
I had a busy week so I had planned to play with it in a week or so. But I walked into a board meeting this week with my partner Kara Nortman and she was filming live on Meerkat asking one of her developers new product ideas. The camera was cast unexpected on me and I was asked to speak. The first thing that came out of my mouth was, “I’m glad I didn’t arrive naked.” Well, I’m glad I didn’t. But since Meerkat is ephemeral live video I guess you can’t go back and catch that awkward moment.
I decided to play with it sooner rather than later. I notice Matt Mazzeo was doing a “late-night jam session” with his girlfriend over sushi. The had about 175 people in a live stream watching them eat sushi while discussing how they thought Meerkat and apps like it could dominate the future. Matt made references to products like Twitch (captures live video while you play video games and bought by Amazon for $1 billion) and how products like Meerkat could take off. I quickly checked Crunchbase to see if he was an investor :) He isn’t. And I confirmed with him later that he isn’t.
They chatted with their audience about ideas from TV and music that could feed into a Meerkat like experience. I was in my bedroom, sitting on a couch, waiting to watch the third season of House of Cards (which should be retitled Jumped the House of Card) and I was transfixed. A really high-quality video of Matt talking at me almost like we were Face-timing. And people were weighing in with comments and he was reading them out and responding. And I saw friends in the room that reminding me of turntable.fm in the early days. It was clumsy, awkward, strange and, well, magical.
It was like you could spy on a midnight, magic mindmeld like the one I had 4 years ago at SXSW but for the masses. Awesome.
The next day I tuned into Danielle. She was walking up a hill in SF to see the sunset. I was transported there. Then David Amaro at some restaurant or bar. I saw my partner Kara Nortman say she was speaking on a VC panel for women. I was at my desk working but I clicked. She had somebody in the front row filming the panel and I was suddenly watching Kara and her fellow panelists as though I was in the front row. I watched for 5–10 minutes while I did email.
Of course the tech existed to do all this before. But the combination of the announcements in my Twitter feed, plus the notification on my phone since I’ve downloaded the app, plus the fact that I have friends live-casting … all teamed up to make for a very cool week of Meerkating.
And of course Mike Isaac said what we were all thinking. After all, we all know what drives real tech innovation.
how long until this is co-opted for porn pic.twitter.com/IeXW8pfpF8
— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) March 5, 2015
We can always count on Mike to say it out loud :)
I haven’t done my own Meerkat live stream yet but I will this week. Truthfully, I hate the way I look in selfies when the camera is too close and I’m not going to buy one of those fucking selfie sticks so I’m either going to have to deal with the selfie thing or do a filming with somebody else holding my phone.
You may know that for years I filmed This Week in VC with Jason Calacanis. One of my favorite things was to take live questions from the audience. I loved that interaction. Since he abandoned the LA studio I started filming my own show — BothSidesTV. But we don’t have a tri-caster so I don’t steam live. Or at least I think I need a tri-caster or some similar equipment for that. So I was thinking maybe I’d Meerkat a Q&A session called AskaVC where you could ask any questions you were dying to know.
Let’s see where all this goes. But honestly — hats off to team Meerkat. I really think you hit lightning in a bottle with this perfectly designed product (with the exception of warning users that their app comments will be published into their Twitter stream :)) But you can fix that :) Good luck inside the eye of the storm.
What do you guys think so far?
