Meerkat has two things going for it: 1) It spammed twitter whenever you used it. Start-up journalists use Twitter constantly. People who hype themselves use T

Meerkat has two things going for it: 1) It spammed twitter whenever you used it. Start-up journalists use Twitter constantly. People who hype themselves use Twitter constantly. This is the live streaming target market. Additionally, Twitter is real-time, like live streaming, and Twitter doesn't actively manage your stream, so the spam wouldn't get hidden (Facebook had this happen to them years ago, and they've since gotten way better at keeping app spam out of your face). Twitter was the perfect existing social network to use here. 2) Twitter noticed this and shut them down quickly. While this sounds like a bad thing, it ended up being perfect for Meerkat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect in action. On top of the natural Streisand effects, there quickly arose a conspiracy around it -- Twitter had recently acquired Periscope, a company competing with Meerkat! And on top of even that, this all happened right as start-up journalists converged on Austin for SXSW, so they could chat about it, use it to live stream bands, etc. On top of these two main factors, Meerkat does have a slightly better onboarding process, and a cute brand.