Meerkat and Periscope. Mobcrush and Twitch. For people not paying attention to live video, these could easily pass for 80s rock bands. For those who have followed Ryan Hoover, Danielle Morrill or me this week, you know they represent the bleeding edge of a movement towards live moments layered on top of our otherwise asynchronous digital world.
Below are some hopes and fears for shared live moments and why Twitter is the perfect soil for it. But first, a quick story.
Live Makes The Internet Feel Less Lonely.
We’re awash in snaps, tweets and grams promising our friends are out there. Yet, with each missive we send into the world, we hold our breath till someone sends a little nudge telling us that for the briefest of clicks, their attention is on us. We crave it. Not just the social feedcrack, but the feeling that you are out there too at the same moment. Often, in those expanded moments of anticipation, we feel alone.
But the other night, late into a jam sesh with a close friend and legendary mobile designer, Danny Trinh, something changed. We booted up Meerkat, a live streaming app less than a week old, and invited our friends with a tweet to join us for a public FaceTime.
Was anyone out there at the same time? Yep. Within minutes we had almost 200 friends and newcomers join what quickly became a discussion about tech, TV, bullshit and anything else that would come up in a discussion with friends over drinks. The product was rough but we wanted to interact with the growing crowd of people still up past bedtime. We tried taking questions through a rudimentary chat line (built almost spammily into Twitter’s main feed) and decided instead to start FaceTiming in friends to bring them into our conversation. Michael Galpert, Bobby Goodlatte, Aaron Batalion, and Josh Elman all stopped by for a minute to jam. Friends called it Meer2Meer. It was late. 2am on an East Coast school night, but it was too fun to stop. We were all there, at the same time. No planning. No scheduling required. New friends too. We didn’t know most of the people in that room but it felt authentic and intimate in a way most social products I see fail mightily to deliver. We were hooked. Afterwards Danny and I talked about the experience and one line stuck in my head:
Meerkat had done to Twitter what FaceTime did to text.
Live is Awesome. Live is Scary.
Over a few days, I played with other formats. Lowercase Office Hours, The Back of an Uber with my partner Chris Sacca, my girlfriend and I on the way to a date at the museum (sorry Abby) and others. Here are some observations. Some I loved, others scared me a little.
- Watercooler reborn. The half-life of most posts can be measured in seconds. Live builds. Having a place to go and jump into a conversation right after you've seen or heard something interesting feels natural and fun. Rather than read that post, comment and move quickly to the next, by giving people a place to congregate and engage, live video recreates the water cooler in a way asynchronous can only hope to approximate. It gives you a moment to watch people react in real time and bond with new friends who may have shared your reaction. I can’t wait to watch great writers who have spent months diving into an feature offer with that thought piece a link to a live conversation. Read this. Then come chat about it. Not on a panel months from now. Right now. Here’s the link. That’s awesome.
- Simple, Fun and Incomplete. This one can be a mixed bag. The magic of these early platforms is you can launch fast, and worry about the details later. Meerkat is a rough product by any measure. Features, design, stability. If it feels like it was built in a few weeks by one engineer that’s mostly because it’s not far from the truth. This is by no means the first live streaming product for web or mobile. We’ve seen more than most teams in venture, I’d wager. But social happens when you least expect it and whether Meerkat is a platform that persists or whether it’s just the first to catch the wave as it’s cresting, there can be risks to emerging first. Better interactivity, Meer2Meer built into the product, link sharing. All show potential to build upon a fun early base. But the leaderboard and the lack of moderation tools scare the crap out of me. Carrots and sticks. Understanding incentives can help predict behavior. While a leaderboard might sound like a great way to juice early competition for activity and get over a cold start, as a social platform grows it can incentivize the worst actors to game a system and spam noise into a still nascent feed poisoning the first exposure for newcomers. No moderation tools? Fine if you’re talking about a small group of friends having a casual conversation, but go ask the team at ChatRoulette what happens when you mix live video and hypergrowth with a lack of moderation tools.
- FaceTime first. Twitter now. Others to come. You remember your first FaceTime. AT&T had promised us a video phone in the 90s but Apple delivered and it was magical. Intimate and personal in a way voice alone couldn't touch. I’m a notorious FaceTime assassin among friends. When they least expect it, Bam! Never fails to get a laugh. That was then, Twitter is now. Twitter is the world’s town hall. It’s where you go to find out what’s happening right now. Live video makes you aware of that in a way you never fully been able to grasp. From live streaming moments of conflict, which seem all too common today, to getting together for an impromptu jam, or a performance from your favorite musician starting their day, Twitter is the perfect Petri dish for all of those interactions and stands poised to be the dominant player in live video. Huge implications here for growing users. Even bigger for revenue. Fullscreen engaging streams from influencers and brands all over the world driven by a public social graph. Show me a brand that doesn’t want to be part of that movement. Expect more. There are other networks that might have the concurrency to build this type of experience. Some will be more natural fits than others e.g. Mobcrush and Twitch. Others will need to adapt to their own community’s needs e.g. Medium, YikYak, Reddit, and Whisper. But this is only the beginning for live experiences over mobile and the opportunity to more deeply engage and grow an audience can’t be understated here. I’m nervous and excited. As an investor, those are usually signs that I’m onto something.
Follow me on Twitter at @Mazzeo and I’ll keep you posted next time I go live.
