MEERKAT

Meerkat is an app that lets you stream video live on the Internet right from your smartphone instantly. Hit the button and you're available for anyone to watch, just like that. You sign up through Twitter, and it notifies your followers whenever you start streaming. And when you're done, there's no recording or archived version of the video — it's just gone. It's so easy that people are just streaming everything.

All those automatic tweets from friends, touting videos you can't watch unless you download an app, drove Meerkat toward the top of the charts. And when you installed it, Meerkat connected to Twitter's "social graph," a detailed data set of all the people you're connected to on the service, to automatically build a network of fellow Meerkat users. Easy streaming, automatic friend network, and of course a huge tech conference going on (SXSW in Austin, Texas) all contributed to its rapid growth. 

Well, Twitter didn't take too kindly to Meerkat scrapping all those details and using them for its own purposes. So Meerkat's access to Twitter's social graph was revoked. Though users could still sign up using Twitter and tweet livestreams, the automatic connection with a group of other Meerkat-ers was no more. Considering Twitter just bought Periscope, which does much the same thing as Meerkat, this limitation isn't too surprising: Twitter aims to do live video on its own. Finding friends isn't as easy as it was, but the developers added a search function to help up for it.