14 DAY TRIAL // Meerkat was an instant success and had a very promising future ahead before Twitter launched its own streaming app and started blocking some of its features in order to reduce its growth and promote its own product.
However, Meerkat has come up with a new update which allows users to push their live streams to their personal Facebook page.
Although Meerkat’s CEO declared that he was not fazed by Twitter’s decision to cut off the application’s access to its social graph, this obviously affected them as they are now reaching to Facebook for support.
He called this decision a speed bump at the time, but it seems to have been more than just that. With no access to the social graph, Meerkat will not know who’s following who.
Given that Meerkat is a direct competitor, it is only natural for Twitter to try to prevent it from growing by implementing stricter rules regarding who has access to its social graph, leaving Meerkat users with no one to broadcast their streams to.
Referred to as Meerkat Update #2, it integrates with a user’s phone address book, allowing them to find users in the phone's contact list, "We auto-magically match the people you already know with phone verification and address book integration."
Facebook might be planning to buy the company
The announcement reinforces the rumors that Facebook intends to buy the live streaming company.
"Meerkat is going to be bought by Facebook, I think, in the next six months," Weblogs CEO Jason Calacanis told CNBC's Squawk Alley.
Although neither of the companies has confirmed these rumors, the fact that Meerkat is now trying to reduce its reliance on Twitter by reaching out to Facebook shows that there is a possibility that Facebook actually plans to acquire meerkat and slowly make its way in the world of live-streaming.
However, back in March, when the app had just launched, Meerkat's CEO, Ben Rubin, had declared that they were not ready to sell the company and that we were focused on making it grow.
Meerkat launched two more features within this second update, namely Mobbing which allows popular streams to be available on the app’s activity feed, making it easier for people to find them, and the fact that users can now show their reaction to a broadcast by temporarily turning their face into an emoji.
The update has currently been made available for iOS only but is shouldn’t be long before it becomes accessible on Android also.