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Meerkat Snuggles Up to Facebook

Meerkat, the adorably named group streaming video app unceremoniously given the boot by Twitter during this year’s SXSW conference, is moving on and finding a new home. According to a post by Meerkat developers on Medium, the app has found as new social media partner, as users can now sign up for the app through Facebook.

Previously, they still had to sign up for Meerkat through Twitter, even though Twitter no longer supported the broadcast streaming platform, which used Twitter to send out alerts when a stream was starting; Twitter dumped Meerkat in favor of its own live streaming video app, Periscope.

The new partnership expands on Meerkat’s previous move allowing brands to share links to streams via Facebook Connect. However there are some important differences in this alliance, as the Facebook integration doesn’t include live alerts to friends when a stream is about to begin -- on the main advantages of Meerkat on Twitter.  

Meerkat announced several other updates as well, including a new shared streaming capability and the ability to save the streams to a cloud-based library.

The shared streaming feature, called Cameo, allows other Meerkat users to take over a video stream for up to a minute, sort of like the classic “over to you, Bob” moment in broadcast TV news. Of course it could also be useful for conferences and other group video functions.

The new saving feature, currently in beta, allows users to save Meerkat streaming video to the Meerkat Library on the cloud, meaning they no longer have to take up precious memory on their devices.

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