Meerkat, Yo and the Sweet Smell of Technology

My friend and former colleague Anthony de Rosa might have been reading my mind when he wrote about how the tech media is sometimes given to hyperventilation about the latest thing. He was writing about Meerkat, the Internet's latest hot sharing toy and the star of this year's SXSW:

It’s OK to just say you think this new thing is kind of interesting, but the breathless predictions just look foolish. So, enjoy these new toys, share your experiences with them, let us know what you like about it.

This is something of a chronic condition for people in my profession (I've had my share of breathless moments). Like de Rosa, I look for the antecedents in anything that's "new." Was "Yo" new? Only in the most ridiculous way: You could send the word "Yo" to someone else on the "Yo" network.

Like Meerkat, Yo got a lot of attention quickly — but that's because the developer collected a quick $1 million from private investors and then quickly got to a maybe $10 million valuation. There was a lot of talk about the high value of binary communication (yes/no), which isn't surprising coming from people who work with "1's" and "0's" and the people who finance them. Among the leaders of that discussion was legendary developer and now VC Marc Andreessen.

I laughed at Yo at the time, but Yo might get the last laugh with a use that has nothing to do with its core: as an alert system being developed for the Apple Watch.

The antecedent snob in me immediately saw the roots of something familiar, that Yo was now Twitter, with select mobile notifications.

The interesting part of tech reporting is connecting dots that aren't necessarily obvious, especially when an old, recognizable idea is improved with a new twist.

How does this apply to Meerkat? It's an app which lets you stream video live. Sound familiar? It should. Live streaming apps have been around almost as long as there have been apps. What's special about Meerkat? Beside the fact it has already captured the imagination of some mainstream, non-technical types, it is the app's leveraging of Twitter that gives it what might be a genuine superpower.

So, for the sake of context, here are two very important dots. Twitter is an established, mainstream network where you can instantly, automatically alert anyone who follows you to something you say now. If that something is compelling live video, you now have a more powerful distribution mechanism than even the TV networks — because if you don't have your TV on, they can't get your attention.

Twitter is always on. And people who want to stay in the know are always on Twitter. That's a notification (above) on my Pebble smartwatch that Wired reporter Mat Honan was broadcasting. It is any wonder that it's TV which is most excited about Meerkat? MSNBC in particular seems to have thoroughly embraced Meerkat to the point where Sarah Studly asked Twitter sarcastically:

"Does @msnbc own @AppMeerkat or something? Just trying to salvage ratings my (sic) seeming young and hip? Sheesh! Enough already w/ the meerkat!”

Eliminating friction is what drives innovation between paradigm shifts. By making it possible, with one click, to live stream to a built-in audience that you automatically notify — and who can share it more widely — Meerkat seems to have enabled the kind of leap in breaking news video that the cameraphone created for still images.

Founder Ben Rubin calls it "A push button for live video to Twitter" and that is no exaggeration. It's easy to imagine Meerkat being the go-to app for anybody who sees anything newsworthy. TV news divisions must be salivating at the prospect and already scrutinizing a Twitter search for "|LIVE NOW|", which Meerkat prepends to every update.

It's not clear whether Twitter will go along with this. Meerkat quickly created a mechanism to give users an intuitively discoverable web presence when Twitter crippled the ability to port your Twitter followers to its network. Harvesting as many Twitter users as possible might prove necessary for Meerkat if Twitter shuts the door completely. Twitter owns its own live streaming app, PeriScope, and has a history of yanking access to potentially competing services.

Meerkat has what I'd call the GoPro dilemma: Why struggle to create your own network when there's a perfectly good one out there for you to exploit? (for GoPro, there are several, including YouTube, of course) Twitter hasn't stopped a Meerkat user's ability to leverage Twitter. As a user, I'm happy to have instant access to my own hard-gained base and the increasingly larger circles that might be at my disposal rather than building a new base somewhere else. That new network may not gain critical mass, even though the underlying product is great.

That sub-plot is about business, not about tech. The desire to be a media platform is palpable and maybe even understandable, but it has nothing to do with whether a GoPro is a great device or Meerkat is a great service.

For now, Meerkat is doing something new and exciting and has so captivated the crowd at SXSW that wise observers like de Rosa are urging people like me "to stop trying to play Techstradamus."

Even Rubin, in a video interview with Fortune's Erin Griffin two days ago, acknowledged that failure was a distinct possibility. Asked if he was worried if people might lost interest "very quickly," Rubin didn't hesitate. "I think that could be the case — we don't know, right? It's only the 16th day," he said. "If we try and people got excited and they left that means that we have more work to do, and that's OK."

But unlike Yo, Meerkat doesn't look like something that will need reinvention to get back, should it also falter early. The mashup of live video and Twitter engagement is just too good not to be.

I come to praise tech called Meerkat. But a Meerkat by any other name would smell as sweet.