Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin on Twitter cutting off access to social graph, competition, and future of live video
Meerkat's Ben Rubin on Twitter, Competition and the Future of Live Video — Ben Rubin, the guy behind app-of-the-moment Meerkat, says he's not surprised that Twitter gave …
Context & Ripple Effects
The day before this interview, Twitter confirmed it was limiting Meerkat's ability to access its social graph — cutting off the auto-follow mechanic that had made Meerkat the app of the moment at SXSW. Rubin tells Re/code he isn't surprised, framing his app openly as a competitor in live video rather than a Twitter companion.
The interview is the opening move in a year-long squeeze: within weeks, Meerkat usage drops under Periscope competition and lost App Store featuring ([[a:827880|usage has dropped due to competition from Periscope, poor stream recommendations, and App Store removal]]), then Twitter leans on celebrities and publishers directly (pushing them to stop using Meerkat) before Meerkat eventually abandons livestreaming for a video social network.
First-order effects
- Meerkat loses its growth engine overnight — new users can no longer auto-follow their Twitter contacts inside the app, forcing Rubin to build distribution from scratch while competing head-on with Twitter-owned Periscope.
Second-order effects
- Twitter escalates beyond infrastructure to relationships: it pressures celebrities and publishers to abandon Meerkat, weaponizing its exclusive hold on both the social graph and the talent that made live video take off.
Third-order effects
- Rubin's later moves trace the lesson forward — Houseparty, then Towns, a protocol-based chat app built so no single platform can cut off the graph again; the broader pattern is that apps dependent on another company's social graph get repriced or killed when that graph becomes competitive territory.
The trend: Platform owners are converting once-open social graphs into closed moats whenever third-party apps start competing with them — the classic case of moat recomposition that pushed Rubin toward protocol-first products like Towns.