Comment by deveac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deveac | Hacker News Reader

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>Meerkat is great too, but clearly has an uphill battle for the next few months after the initial hype.

I wonder about nuances of engagement on Periscope vs. Meerkat.

Periscope's saved video is touted as a feature, but I've noticed that because Meerkat does not give me this option, when I get a notification for a stream I want to watch, I hustle to engage because it's live and I don't want to miss it.

I have not used Periscope yet and will be checking it out, but I can absolutely envision a scenario where I get a Pscope notification and ignore it because there really is no urgency as it will be there later. And then those streams end up like just another article in my "read-it-later" apps. Saved and then forgotten because I've moved on, and the promise of what could be in that stream just isn't compelling enough to chase it down later. Saved video is what we already have everywhere all of the time.

My guess is that Meerkat's inability to save the stream could be the killer feature.

While I can see why Meerkat providing the option not to save as a feature it is also its greatest frustration. My success rate of actually viewing a Meerkat stream before it gets taken offline is maybe 20%.

As I saw on Twitter the other day, Meerkat is great at letting you know you are too late to view a Meerkat stream.

I think there's a happy medium. My experience has been the opposite: I have never managed to show up on time for a Meerkat so the experience was worse than horrendous. I understand what you're saying about the artificial ephemorality being important to the dynamics, tho. I'd try to find some happy medium where speed is encouraged but content is still available for a short period for us mere mortals.

That's not a feature, that's a limitation that forces you to change your behaviour. It's forcing user engagement. And when I see a Meerkat feed I missed I'm just annoyed (especially as I expect it to be live when I tap the tweet) - I'm much happier being able to see a replay on periscope.

> That's not a feature, that's a limitation that forces you to change your behaviour.

... Like, say, limiting tweets to 140 chars?

IIRC the original reason for that was because of the length of a text message, so it was a technical restriction more than anything.

I think Periscope is the way of Twitter to counteract Meerkat. They have fear to Meerkat make the same that Instagram made with the photos.

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