The Back Story of Meerkat: A Side Project That Took Off
Downloaded Meerkat yet? TechCrunch : Twitter In Talks With Live Streaming App Periscope Tweets: Campus London / @campuslondon : An experimental side project that took off http://blogs.wsj.com/... - The back story of @AppMeerkat via @WSJ
Context & Ripple Effects
When the WSJ profiled [[a:@AppMeerkat|Meerkat]] in early March 2015, it was still the scrappy side project of its origin story — an iOS experiment that had caught fire fast. The competitive picture was already hardening around it: Twitter was reportedly in talks to acquire Periscope, meaning the startup was about to fight a rival backed by the very social graph Meerkat depended on.
The following months traced the squeeze. Periscope's launch-week surge cooled, with daily tweets to its streams settling near Meerkat's own level; Meerkat answered by shipping Android first and launching a developer platform to differentiate from Periscope. By 2016 it had abandoned pure livestreaming, and later that year Life on Air pulled the app entirely to bet on Houseparty.
First-order effects
- Twitter's reported move to acquire Periscope puts Meerkat in direct competition with a platform owner that controls the distribution channel — the Twitter timeline — where both apps compete for the same streamers and viewers.
- Meerkat's rapid growth out of a side-project base forces it to scale engineering and product immediately, expanding beyond iOS to hold its audience.
Second-order effects
- Meerkat responds to Periscope's backing by racing it to Android and opening a developer platform — differentiation through ecosystem rather than raw reach, since it cannot match Twitter-owned distribution.
- Periscope's engagement normalizing near Meerkat's level shows neither app holds a durable engagement lead, pushing the contest toward features and platform lock-in rather than novelty.
Third-order effects
- The arc — independent live-stream app rises, gets squeezed by a platform owner's owned-and-operated rival, pivots to a different product — points to a structure where apps built on top of someone else's social graph are structurally fragile against the platform's own offerings.
- Life on Air's retreat from livestreaming into Houseparty becomes the template exit for such apps: when the category consolidates around incumbents, the survivors sell or pivot rather than compete head-on.
The trend: Consumer live streaming consolidated around platforms that own their own distribution, forcing independent apps like Meerkat to differentiate, pivot, or exit.