The holy grail of the private and live moment

Last year I wrote a blog here on ‘the holy grail of the private moment’. The thoughts were triggered by the smart decisions in the design of Taptalk. I see a similar thing happening with the new flow of live streaming apps that was hyped with Meerkat at SXSW and is now taking over by Periscope, the tool Twitter introduced yesterday earlier than planned (although it could be a smart strategy as well to let the hype grow via a new app and a quick overtake as soon as people start picking up the behaviour).

Both Live Experience tools are based on an integration with Twitter, and both work with the concept of sharing live streaming video on the very moment of happening. The trends is broader than those two (and there is a third one: Hang w/), Snapchat is having a comparable promise with their stories that remains visible for 24 hours. And also the ubiquitous dashcams in Russia that are spreading is part of the trend towards continuous close-by sharing.

The private and exclusive experience is as important to the love for these services as the live aspect of the video is. It is interesting that Meerkat and Periscope has a different approach in offering that private feel. With Periscope you can choose to share only to selected people. This has huge potential and could be well be the template for all other private messaging services to add video in the same manner. Think Whatsapp adding live sharing video.

Meerkat create the private feeling in much more subtle manner. And probably not even on purpose. By chosing to make the app very rudimental and embed it in your personal Twitter-graph is feels in all aspects as a private party you join as soon you enter the stream. By not showing active live streams outside your own group of contacts and also show only the streams as they are live, exclusivity is raised. And above all, the streams are just as private as the real thing. It is over as it is over. No life caching, just experiencing the moment.

I think Meerkat has with that deep connection to the actual thing a much better experience. I hope it will keep this strategy and will not be tempted to add extra functions that break that down. If Twitter and Periscope play it well they can extend the private video sharing into a more private messaging system.