Now Twitter, which just days ago acted to prevent Meerkat tapping into its own users quite so easily, has launched a rival service called Periscope. Battle has been joined and there's unlikely to be more than one winner.
Both apps provide an extremely simple way of going live from your mobile phone with just a couple of taps - and letting the world see what you see. This is not particularly new - services like Qik, Bambuser and Livestream have allowed you to go live from your phone for some years. But Meerkat and Periscope have come along just as many mobile users have easier and cheaper access to the necessary data connection and they also make it far easier to connect with an audience.
You quickly see how many people are watching - I think my highest audience has been 47, and apparently a Meerkast with the White House press secretary attracted several hundred viewers. Not exactly the world coming together, but then this is a very new app. Once you stop streaming, anyone who arrives too late has no way of retrieving your Meerkast. As I've often found, it can be frustrating to get a message saying someone is streaming, only to find it's over by the time you tune in.
One really annoying aspect is that you can only film in portrait mode, so although you can save the video you shoot onto your phone, you wouldn't want to show it on a standard 16:9 screen.
Periscope works in a similar way, but I found it performed just slightly better - perhaps because until today it's only had a few test users. I did not get the connection issues that occasionally saw my Meerkasts switch to audio-only mode. But what really impressed here was some of the content. I downloaded the beta version of the app just as the astronaut Chris Hadfield was starting a broadcast on an apparently mundane subject - packing his suitcase
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