Someone said there was a Meerkat party on Product Hunt so I checked my Persicope.
Report
1/ visually the website/app & branding are gorgeous
2/ being the goliath against the underdog in this live streaming race means you will need to focus extra hard on UX and customer service.
3/ stay strong to your product vision. try not to let corporate twitter dictate product decisions
Stoked to finally have a shot at this app. Great work folks! Such a nice experience. It'll be interesting to get through this honeymoon phase to see who sticks around + how the activity pans out. I'm really curious to see what angles Meerkat sticks/moves to.
Overall, having access to replay is a bigger deal than most give it (love it here). More importantly is the discovery aspects. Opening the app with several streams to explore (+ recent replays), instead of a wall of nothing, is a huge win. I fired up a stream with 20 or so people joining in nearly immediately (without broadcasting to Twitter), which made for a much smoother start.
The chat experience needs work. I get that they need to tame down the chatter, but I couldn't a) chat at all or b) see anyone else saying things unless I was streaming (or very early into a popular stream). I could throw some hearts at the broadcaster, but even that left me wondering if they were even seeing anything.
@xmcgraw The chat experience definitely needs work! It was really hard to imagine what chat would feel like and behave like with 1,500 people in a room (Jimmy Fallon's broadcast just posted those numbers). So we're learning about how the UX works (and in particular, how performance behaves) in those conditions for the first time.
One main consideration is making sure chat doesn't fly off the screen before you have a chance to read it. Obviously that's not fun to experience. We put a lot of thought into this for a v1, but still have so much to do to figure out the right balance of 'no clutter' and practicality (being able to read the comments). We also made a decision that after a certain point, it's just not practical to have thousands of people chatting in the same room (hard to have any UX handle this appropriately without a lot of complexity), which is why we have a "fallback" experience for some users that shows up as "Sorry, the broadcast is too full to chat". We'll continue to tweak these values and this approach in an effort to make the experience manageable for both broadcasters/viewers.
Open to your thoughts and suggestions on how you'd like it to behave!
@kayvz Great thoughts. I'm sure you all are working very hard find a nice balance here.
I'm less worried about being locked out of contributing because of a full room (which I feel most people understand). I'm more concerned that I can't read what the room is saying. I was watching a Q/A yesterday and the broadcaster was reading thoughts and answering questions that never showed up on my screen. I just felt that left me in the dark unnecessarily.
Overall, slamming 1500 chatty people into one room is clearly not going to work. Neither is 10k+ when this continues to grow and hits a major news event.
One thing to consider is providing explicit tools to help separate questions from nasty chatter. If a room is full, let me ask a question that could eventually gets to the broadcaster. You could slide those questions inside of chat dead zones. The key is that the observer knows that the question may not get to the broadcaster, but at least she can attempt to engage.
Keep up the great work
Some of the assumptions here are the usual that only 1 app, service, startup, platform will survive and grow. In a competing field, you may have 1 dominate company, but that never means you can't have competition. Sure Uber is the major player, but Lyft still exists, the taxi business hasn't gone out of business (though taxi medallions are dropping in value).
The binary thinking of success is probably the one thing that annoys me most in the tech industry. I figure its mostly due to funding. Its harder to get investment funds if you're trying to launch something that competes with an existing platform that's received major funding from a major VC firm. The underdog can survive and thrive. Multiple businesses can serve the same needs of the market and all do just fine. Meerkat will most likely do just fine in the face of Periscope. We'll probably see half a dozen me-toos coming along, several of which will also find a niche and audience and create their own value and market.
Report
Like it but still think I like Meerkat better - I'm @ChrisVoss on both.
@ChrisVoss Hey Chris! I sat next to you at dinner in Sun Valley at Dent! Good to see you on PH!
What do you like better about Meerkat? Or just like rooting for the underdog?
@ChrisVoss@chrisvoss why do you think so? less features, less community (unless you already have close friends who adopted?), less discoverability. Just curious.
Pretty bummed that, just like Meerkat, this launched iOS-only. Huge chunk of the market going unserved right now, and that doesn't just hurt Android users, it hurts all the iOS users who can't share experiences with many of their real-life friends.
iOS only launches happen all the time & I understand the development reasons for it but was hoping with Twitter funding that Periscope might come out the door with both.
Replies
Product Hunt
Tomorrow
Breakr
Tomorrow: To-Do List, Focused
Tomorrow
Tomorrow: To-Do List, Focused
Mute.vc
Book Your Sales
Tomorrow
Hipmunk
Cursor
Mashable for iPhone
Backchannel