“Now if I did that on Twitter, then, you know I got 2.7 million followers, I’m going to get 300 people calling me a crackhead or something stupid, right? And trolling me, and I can’t really have any type of engagement because the minute you try to have an honest conversation, someone jumps in the middle of it.”
- Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur, Shark on ABC’s “Shark Tank” & owner of the Dallas Mavericks
Action starts at 23:00:
I know it’s only been one week using Meerkat but I am fucking exhausted. My iPhone beeps and rattles every 30 seconds to inform me somebody, anybody is now live from somewhere.
And if I’m late to join a live stream — and I usually am —I miss it completely and then I sulk for five minutes about what could have been and muse about what I missed out on. I imagine this is roughly how the VCs that don’t get invited to the next Meerkat funding dance will feel.
I can’t wait to see what Meerkat Week 2 has in store for me but thought I’d share my deep learnings of Meerkat Week 1.
Here’s goes nothing:
- That little mongoose-like app drains my iPhone 6+ battery like no other; feels like I own the original iPhone again which does make me kinda nostalgic. I now carry my charger everywhere I go again. Note to Walt Mossberg: you are gonna love this app!
2. Promiscuous use of notifications means I can now toss out my awesome vibrator collection and make the iPhone my ultimate go-to device! So this is what all the BUZZ is about.
3. Please roll out the welcome mat for all trolls and spammers. Lack of any form of moderation tools kills any semblance of meaningful 2-way communication using chat feature. Ummm, excuse me but I opened this link first so I should be the person able to chat with Kevin Jonas’ wife Danielle (you know, the OTHER Danielle on Meerkat).
4. Yeah, I am a HUGE fan of vanity-inspired leaderboards. Building a start-stop-start program as I write. See you at the top, @mazzeo! I mean, @DanielleMorrill, I mean @rrhoover. Wait! Just got bumped by @garyvee.
5. Okay, exactly how are they planning to make money on this aside from selling it to The Greater Fool? Mark the “Twitter will buy us!” exit strategy off the list as Twitter just plunked down an estimated $100 million for a pre-launch beta livestream video product from Periscope. I guess we should have leveraged someone else’s social graph. Don’t fret guys — here’s how we make dough: Like millions of others, I am dying to do a pay-per-view event of my tabby filling up her litter box. Come on, I know you’d watch that if given the chance and you know I’d take your money to watch you do it.
6. Is it just me or is everyone plagued with the “low connectivity” message? I have 50mbps in my pad so I am pretty sure it is not me. I am already kinda worrying how this is going to not work during my vacation to Costa Rica.
7. Someone please explain this to me because I’m really confused. How can something be ephemeral if you can push the “SAVE” button when you are finished livecasting? You know, it’s like a video Snapchat but you can save it. Oh, okay now I get it.
8. After we solve the problem of cleaning up all the space debris, can someone please figure out how to clean up all the dead #meerkat links in my Twitter feed? It’s getting pretty messy over there in Twitterland and I’m a digital Felix Unger. Time to summon the Recology of the online world.
9. Aside from all that, it is pretty genius but it does makes me wonder if we are all fawning over a stream-grabbing Herpestidae, does this mark the “jump the shark” moment for this tech cycle?
10. Nothing to say here except that I had a boss once who told me I should always have exactly 5 OR 10 bullet points even if I had nothing else to really say.
Gotta run, just received a notification that @socialinfluencer is meerkatting again (yes, that’s a verb!”) and Lord knows, I don’t want to miss that.
