Just days after taking its Android app out of closed beta and launching it to the public, Meerkat today posted a major update to its livestreaming app.
The latest version of Meerkat for iOS allows users to link their account to their Facebook page, meaning that they can easily post information about their streams to Facebook. The move also lets other users sign-in with Facebook to subscribe and view streams. Previously, you’d need to be a Twitter user to sign up for Meerkat, but the addition of Facebook support makes Twitter accounts optional.
This new Meerkat update also adds a few smaller — but still notable — tweaks. You can use phone verification and app integration to find and subscribe to people that you know on Meerkat, and you can now briefly transform your avatar into an emoji, which works by commenting with the emoji of your choice. Finally, a new feature called “Mobbing” will highlight streams that meet a “certain criteria” by pushing them to the main Meerkat activity feed and showing a meerkat flying in a rocket.
Early on in its life, Meerkat relied heavily on Twitter to get new users to sign up, to connect them with others, and to share news of their streams. Twitter eventually cut Meerkat off from its social graph that would let its users connect with others, and now Twitter has its own Meerkat competitor, so Meerkat needs to find other ways for users to find people to follow and for the service to grow. Meerkat still faces a tough competitor in Twitter’s Periscope service but the addition of Facebook support and its new Android app should help to give it a boost.
Have you used Meerkat? If so, what do you think of the livestreaming app?
