The Snapchat Version of a Tweetstorm

I’ve been using Meerkat lately, trying to understand what has made it so interesting and popular within the tech community. For those who don’t know what Meerkat is, it’s an app for streaming live video from your phone, leveraging your Twitter followers as an audience.

Besides being able to teleport yourself to a different location and get a glance at other people’s experiences and events for a couple of minutes, what’s most interesting about Meerkat streams is its ability to create live and rich ephemeral conversations within the broadcaster and its audience. In fact, one of the most popular use cases for Meerkat streams has been AMAs or topic specific talks, where the audience will guide the conversation based on text based questions asked within the live stream.

This got me thinking on its resemblance to tweetstorms, but in a more graphical and real time manner. As Josh Elman noted, tweetstorms are Twitter enabled conversations, allowing the author to interact with its followers and build a conversation around the topic he’s addressing, while building his case tweet by tweet.

In this way, Meerkat streams are the Snapchat version of a tweetstorm

I believe Meerkat is capturing the same underlying need for people to engage and communicate in real time, but in Snapchat-ephemeral-video way.

I was surprised how fun and interesting these Meerkat streams were, allowing me to be part and affect the outcome of an experience happening in other places.

Anyways, besides how addicting it looks within the tech community, Meerkat still has the same big challenge every synchronous communication medium has: capturing people’s attention at the right time. In this way, it must avoid becoming the next Turntable instead of the next Youtube.