Twitter has confirmed that they have bought Periscope, the close competitor of Meerkat. This has prompted the social network to kill a few of Meetkat's features. Periscope has announced this milestone.
"You may have heard some news: It involves a blue bird. #YouCanGuessTheRest #WeJoinedTheFlockInJanuary #AreWeUsingThisRight #IsThisThingOn," Persicope tweeted.
Meerkat is one of the fast-rising, live-video Twitter broadcasting platform that has seemed to gain millions of fan base since its launch a few weeks prior. Through it, live stream viewers could tweet directly at you and make it appear instantly on your screen.
Most of Meerkat's success, including failures, is brought in due to its integration with Twitter. This is something that a lot of people have noticed to result to an issue in the long run, especially that Twitter has decided to finally get itself into live videos.
Now, Twitter has started to limit Meerkat's access to the social graph of Twitter. This means that users can still login to their Twitter accounts, but automatically follows the Meerkat feeds of those that they follow on Twitter, vice versa. It has made Meerkat a natural Twitter extension.
Buzzfeed was able to spot this change, first, when their follower counts seemed to vary between the two services.
A Twitter spokesperson said that they have limited the service's access into their system to stay in line with their internal policies.
"We are limiting their access to Twitter's social graph, consistent with our internal policy. The users will still be able to distribute videos on Twitter and login with their Twitter credentials," the spokesperson said.
While Meerkat has already established a fair momentum behind them, this isn't one of those that the company will be excited about, especially that a new in-house competitor is looming.