With the advent of social media, most developers focus on new social apps to get a slice of the ever-increasing market. Some of these apps appear out of the blue, quickly gaining their 15 minutes of fame, and also quickly fading into the background; others, especially those with which the social media community can connect with, spread like wildfire and continue to grow.
Such is the case of the live streaming app Meerkat. After being featured on Product Hunt on Feb. 27, the app was downloaded 30,000 times within a week, even without advertisements. The app continues to increase its fan base.
Meerkat is an app that allows users to do live broadcasts with a simple touch of a button. Users can live stream from their smartphones or tablets to all of their Meerkat followers. Every time a video is recorded using the app, it automatically tweets a post with a link to the livestream, and interaction with viewers can be done via tweet replies. Because of this design that works exclusively with Twitter, Meerkat easily caught the attention of the Twitter community.
According to Meerkat CEO and co-founder Ben Rubin, the app started as an offshoot of their previous venture, an app that allows users to send live broadcasts to friends or a group.
Today, Meerkat downloads continue to skyrocket, and most online publishers and news aggregators use it for their live streams. Most notable of Meerkat's users are Yahoo News, when it conducted an interview about Net neutrality, and Oregon State University, broadcasting its press conferences. Other brands such as Starbucks and JCPenney have also started using the app.
However, Rubin doesn't plan to release Meerkat on Facebook, known to be the largest social media site.
"Facebook is not a real-time platform," Rubin said in an interview with Skift. "It doesn't cater to what we want to do."
