Meerkat: *Real* Real-Time

What’s realer than real-time in social? Live.

Meerkat may have cracked the code for popularizing livestreaming, both for content creators and audience. While Ustream, Google Hangouts On Air, and others have found themselves aligned with planned content and appointment viewing (and various other live video apps are just irrelevant or dead), Meerkat has earned its recent visibility by leveraging four key principles:

Live Mobile Content

Immediacy is verité. Spontaneous is surprising. People seem to remain fascinated by the gambit of live broadcasting, that anything can happen at any moment.

True real-time content is just the kind of authentic, organic experience people want from social media. It’s usually the opposite of the planned, crafted and sculpted experience, which means less pretense. This not only appeals to viewers, but it also notably removes the barriers to participation for creators. It’s OK to be less than polished perfect; it’s live, baby.

Meerkat is the content creator as correspondent, camera in hand, wherever they may be, bringing their audience along, right at the moment.

And it only happens once — now. No reruns on Meerkat.

Social Functionality

Meerkat has upped its chances of overcoming one of the biggest obstacles in launching a new app — accumulating a critical mass of users — by building its entire social platform upon Twitter, and to great effect.

Your Meerkat login is your Twitter login. Followers are automatically added from Twitter to both your Following and Followers lists, providing built-in audience. Comments and Likes within a livestream are published through Twitter. This allows retweeting and favoriting Meerkat activity outside of the livestream platform environment. Hashtagging comes along for the ride here, enhancing discoverability.

And don’t forget this means Twitter’s API provides for repurposing all this data to other apps and sites outside of Twitter’s own platform. Top it off with OS-level notifications from both Meerkat and Twitter and you’re pretty much aware whenever one of your Twitter friends is livestreaming.

Social Proof

The net result of all that Twitter-based activity within Meerkat is a great deal of public-facing evidence that something is happening that people are paying attention to. Meerkat gets on people’s radars.

The app got a lift after being featured on Product Hunt, which uses crowd dynamics to surface and rank appreciated products, triggering a cyclical process of awareness and participation that rewards truly interesting experiences.

When Twitter influencers gravitate and respond favorably to Meerkat and its built-in audience, their activity is evidenced in all their followers’ Twitter feeds whether or not they’re Meerkat users, with commensurate ripple effects. The use cases demonstrated by tech stars Danielle Morrill and Ryan Hoover play out this point.

Even within Meerkat, the Leader Board shows who’s got the highest Score (possibly aggregate number of viewers to date) demonstrating popularity along with a base layer of gamification.

Since the livestream URLs can be viewed on any device — no Meerkat app required — all your viewers see not just the app in action but also the followers and their interactions. It all certainly generates curiosity.

Focused Attention Channel

When you’re tuned into live video on a mobile device, chances are you’re actually watching that video — and nothing else. Full immersion environments, regardless of time spent, mean full attention on one activity, in this case viewing content. For brands and personalities this is a golden mindset. If you’ve been tuned into Snapchat on a daily basis, you know exactly how captivating this can be.

Where We Are

For now, we’re in the fascination stage with Meerkat. The tech bleeding edge are checking out early adopters and trying the whole experience on for size. We’ll soon weigh the effects of content fatigue, bad content, intrusiveness, et al, against feelings of connection, quality, value and lasting interest. It’s time to see what happens over time.

It’s also time to sandbox ideas, to get our hands dirty, making the mistakes now when nobody will hold it against us.

What’s to Come?

One of the fun things about new technologies is the ideas they spark. It’s easy to imagine all kinds of experiences springing from the livestream mindset fostered by using Meerkat:

• A searchable, customizable, socially-informed Now on Meerkat third-party app indexing everything of interest — to you, your friends, your location, etc.

• A monetized Highlights front page in the app itself, offering visibility to streams who pay for it.

• Channels filtering multiple aggregated user feeds of live news and entertainment events in a “choose your angle” format.

• Traditional news organizations using their own channels. Duh.

• Brand new news organizations made possible by Meerkat.

• Crowdsourcing reporters — an “Uber for news” model. Don’t steal my idea!!!

• Sneak peeks from brands and celebrities. Duh.

What will be the seminal moment for livestreaming that puts it on the map as a must-consider context? Will it be a grassy knoll, a Ferguson, a spacecraft liftoff, or an Al Capone’s vault? What would be exclusive to the handheld experience over traditional media?

Who will be Meerkat’s early stars and influencers? Which brands will work creative magic on the platform and which will fill their channel with the same old drivel?

Check back in three months to see where Meerkat has taken us.

You can find me on Meerkat (and Twitter) at @luckylou.