Meerkat made its debut as a social live streaming app on Twitter. However, since this is a third-party program, Twitter hoped to gain control over the independent app by turning off some of Meerkat's native controls like auto-adding Twitter users and restricting push notifications. More recently, Twitter acquired its own live streaming app that the social networking site hopes will put Meerkat's gaining popularity on hold. 

Twitter has launched Periscope, a live video streaming app that also lets users broadcast live video via their smartphones and let their followers instantly see it on their social network. Aside from the real-time broadcast, followers can also comment and like the video instantly. 

Most of the features of these two apps are similar. First, both of them need Twitter since the live streams need the user's site account in order to get started. Twitter users can simply livestream videos and even audio directly from their devices, and share the auto links on the social networking site. Their followers could then click on the link, comment on it, and also share the link with others in their social network. 

Now that it was officially launched, how would Twitter's own Periscope app gain an edge over Meerkat? 

One of the biggest features that Periscope has is the ability to save video streams for users to watch later. In Meerkat, the live streams are instantly uploaded in real time, but once the link expires, the video is gone. In addition, Twitter's acquired app has a better design build and user interface, developed over the course of a year, over Meerkat. Periscope also streams to both mobile and desktop browsers. 

Twitter's move to acquire and officially make Periscope one of the native apps on the social networking site seems to be a sound move to expand its horizon and broaden the scope of the social networking scene.