Twitter ripped off Meerkat. That's all I will ever see to this story. I don't care how succesfully they may be or become.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Meerkat. It's just the way it is. Twitter deserves every bad bit of luck they are getting lately.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Meerkat. It's just the way it is. Twitter deserves every bad bit of luck they are getting lately.
When Facebook launches streaming video, should we be angry at them since they have way more money/users than Twitter, and because Twitter did it first?
If Meerkat has built something defensible, then they'll be fine. If not, nobody should expect them to just be deemed the only company that can do streaming video. During Twitter's history, many people tried to pop up and knock them down to take the lead - but Twitter was tenacious and had an awesome product, and they won.
It's a long game and Meerkat can still win it. If one early competitor is enough to crush them, then they probably weren't going to make it anyway.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter are far from omnipotent. Want proof? Just look at Google's failed attempts to get into TV advertising or social networking. Or Facebook's attempts with Messenger. Or Twitter's... everything, really.
Also, consider, it's unlikely any of them would copy an idea until you've already made it a success, at which point network effects can work in your favour (again, Google's repeatedly aborted attempts in social networking are illustrative, here).
To summarize: they might try to copy you, but there's no reason to assume they'll succeed.
> "The best thing of all worlds is to build a product that a lot of people really love. In practice, you can't usually do that, because if there's an opportunity like that, Google or Facebook will do it. So there's like a limit to the area under the curve, of what you can build. So you can build something that a large number of users like a little bit, or a small number of users love a lot."
MSFT/GOOG etc... could always decide to "un-suck" and kill some new hot thing, but it's a deus ex machina and not something you can predict, so it shouldn't really even be a consideration.
I get where you're coming from but deep pockets and an army of engineers doesn't guarantee success. Google+ never got out of the "it sucks" stage into mainstream success. The legacy of Steve Jobs is also littered with fanciful ideas that never got traction. I guess my point is there is a point to innovating and attempting to try, even as a small player, because there's really no guarantees.
I can't recall the exact story right now, but I recently heard that a well-to-do / highly funded flight project (Langley?) failed, and a short time later, the shoe-string operation by the Wright Brothers was successful.
"MSFT/GOOG could just do it and kill your [service]" is a very common response to anyone who is launching anything new or groundbreaking and it's also a misguided response.
So worrying that BIGCO will do that is basically a worthless concern and saying that because something is obvious in retrospect that it was inevitable is not particularly useful.
That said, they still can do it and on the rare occasion when they do, instead of doing an acquisition it usually does kill the newcomer. So to the original point, it seems like it's actually becoming more common than less for them to spin something up rather than acquire.
Twitter pulled some very dirty stuff on Meerkat, merely days before launching Periscope and later, in order to favour their own Meerkat clone. That's when everything changed from 'it's a free market' to 'it's our market and we can kick you out for no reason'. And yeah, it actually is Twitter's market, they are allowed to do anything they like with it and "monopoly regulations" aside, they can kick you out of their for no reason.
But let me tell you what I don't find ethical about all of this. That when you are going to develop for them, they do not tell you straight away: we are going to fuck you up if what you do turns out to be valuable; quite the contrary, they just put out their "we-are-so-cool-and-we-love-developers" face and invited everyone to be part of their platform blah blah blah.
That started around 5-6 years ago, and probably you (selectively) won't remember this either, but back then the first killer apps that Twitter had were third-party Twitter clients that made the whole user experience better. They were a hit because back then, too, the main Twitter UX was a piece of s... and these alternatives were so much better. And guess what happened to those products? Twitter pulled the same shit on them, they bought TweetDeck which was arguably the one with the most users (or the one that needed the money the most), and banned all other clients from their API with a week-or-so notice. At that time, that thing was even worse, because I would even dare to say that Twitter somehow was in debt with those developers because a significant contribution to the growth of twitter was driven by people going through all these third-party clients, that's plain treachery and there's even a special circle in Hell for that thing.
Now history repeats again and will repeat forever because the message from Twitter in that sense is very clear: we don't give a shit about our developers.
But now, it's good to see that things are finally turning around. Twitter desperately needs a killer app right now, because they've lost the hype, they're running out of money and investors don't eat anymore that "we will be profitable in ten years" crap. The only one way that Twitter could be hip again is, oooooh the irony, if another great product starts driving people back into using Twitter, but guess what? No developer will ever take Twitter seriously anymore, and that's just and sweet beautiful karma :)
Btw, it would be honest for you to disclaim about your relationship with Twitter :^)
Seems to me that Twitter built a truly massive social media platform with hundreds of millions of users interacting with short real-time updates in a semi-public manner. An accomplishment nearly no other company has ever done.
Meerkat had the remarkably obvious and unoriginal idea of having this hyper successful platform also host some live streaming video. In implementing this obvious extension to the Twitter platform they ignored the effect of their intrusive updates on the UX for everyone else in violation of the terms of service.
Twitter decided that the experience of posting media on Twitter is their department and acted accordingly. In the process Meerkat's founders and investors were deprived of the opportunity to become billionaires in exchange for a few months of development and a trip to Austin. My heart breaks at this injustice.
The timing of the meerkat -> Periscope launches indicates that your analysis of how "obvious" and "unoriginal" it was is probably wrong. It's not like this was a big thing before meerkat came out, not that they were the first, but meerkat essentially made the market.