There's a new rabbit-hole in town, begging us to dive right down it.New rival iOS apps Periscope and Meerkat offer the same fundamental experience. They allow us to watch live streams as they're filmed by individuals' smartphones around the globe, and post our live comments. As Periscope puts it, it's somewhat like teleporting yourself inside other people's heads and looking out through their eyes.
The implications of these free apps feel huge, and admittedly not just in a good way. Mostly in a good way, though, I hope. One thing's for sure: this feels like the biggest game-changer since Twitter came along in 2006.
Meerkat came first, but Periscope, which launched yesterday on March 26, has the advantage of having been bought by Twitter. So I suppose you'd get short odds on Meerkat becoming Betamax to Periscope's VHS. Then again, people like underdogs. Or underkats.
So what's the user experience like? I've been transfixed by these apps last night and this morning. Before we stop to consider what it all means, let's take a look at some teleportations I made into random strangers' heads...
A couple broadcasting on Meerkat were driving through Arizona, heading for the Grand Canyon...
Occasionally, like many users, they would flip their phone's camera to reverse, so we could see them driving as they chatted away. Eventually, though, they warned us they were about to take a break, because this was about to happen...
As more people get into these apps, the infrastructure is clearly going to be tested and broken, time and time again. I teleported myself over to some kind of lively daytime Grime rave in Miami...
Look at them all there, reaching for the lasers. Then I zipped over to Atlanta, Georgia, to join the likeable James Andrews (@KeyInfluencer on Twitter)...
... who had just got home from work and was staging a live "dinner party", asking his virtual guests what music they wanted to hear and chatting merrily. When James greeted me by name, seconds after I joined the stream, the weirdly instant nature of this connection really became apparent. At one point, he carried us up to his roof to see the view. Meanwhile, in San Diego...
... we got to see a panel of the future of podcasting. Which was apt, since watching a live conversation like this probably is the future of podcasting. All the screengrabs so far have been from Meerkat, by the way. I think I prefer the interface to Periscope - the streamed video fills the whole screen and there's more information onscreen too. It also feels more chatty. Watch out for the way Meerkat auto-tweets on your behalf, though: I found out the hard way.
Periscope has other major advantages, such as (a) more streams available at any given time; and (b) the ability to replay videos once they've been aired (this morning I caught up on a guided tour around Patreon's headquarters, complete with all the live comments which had popped up during the original live broadcast.) As with most rival products, you inevitably want to squash the best parts of each together.
Somewhere unspecified in America, the people of Arsenic Magazine were seemingly trying out their first Meerkat broadcast. Except they didn't realise they were filming. When they ended the broadcast, by hitting a button which they had expected to begin it, this was their reaction...
Some of these grabs speak for themselves...
One of the broadcasts I enjoyed most was @dmgrossblatt's bicycle ride around San Francisco, stopping by the Golden Gate Bridge and looking across to Oakland - even attaching a telescopic lens to his iPhone to aid that process!
At one point, @dmgrossblatt craned his bike-cam up at a building and asked people to screengrab it for him. I grabbed this one...
... and marvelled at how I could then show him, via Twitter. Or I could have, if my app or Tweetdeck had allowed it. (Think the iPad's screengrab file size stood in the way there.)
Switching over to Periscope now, this is what one stream looked like as it was loading...
... and here's the stream. The map and details fall away, but you can get them back by hitting the little 'people' icon, which also shows the number of people viewing. Tap the screen anywhere, it seems, and you trigger a little floating 'favourite' heart which contributes to the user's total. (There's a league table, oh yes, trust and believe.)
Some users are already treating those love hearts like a currency. Take, for instance, this guy outside Walmart at 5.30am, requesting a certain number of hearts before he'll show us inside. Hmmm...
Some more Periscope grabs. Paris traffic, a game in Hong Kong, breakfast in Limerick...
Beers in Sydney, a stroll in Malaysia, a view over Seoul...
... and, uh, a donut run in Norwich.
This blind guy in Saudi Arabia tentatively tried out his first broadcast, constantly apologising for his English. Believe you me, his English was way better than my Arabic.
You'll be glad to hear I won't be showing you the guy in Mumbai with one hand down the front of his pyjamas, purring, "Tell me what you want to seeeeee..." As with every live video feed, a certain type of guy will decide that everyone's dying to see his junk. Periscope and Meerkat have Report and Flag buttons respectively, so it will be interesting to see how those work and how hardline each company will be when it comes to policing themselves.
So, anyway: what does all of this mean?
I'm still processing it all, but it certainly means that the world just got even smaller, even more connected. Whether that's good or bad, depends on your attitude to this. Here are some thoughts, starting with the plus side...
Periscope and Meerkat will undoubtedly be a shot in the arm for writers' research. As a writer, this was my first thought, oh dear God yes. The idea that I could go on Twitter and ask if anyone lives in, say, South Dakota, and ask them to film their street, or hop on a bus to film their city centre. Maybe answer a few questions via chat. That feels very instant and insanely useful. Way better than the already-awesome Google Streetview and second only to Actually Being There. Of course, what we gain in research value we may lose in added reasons to procrastinate.
On a simple entertainment level, they're just downright fun. Zipping and zapping from one country to another, with a few strokes of a screen? That's amazing. An addictively vicarious and curiosity-sating thrill. And digging a little deeper than that, there's a chance these apps may fuel a much-needed increase of empathy in the world. Being able to look through someone else's eyes on the other side of the planet can only be an exercise in good on most levels. Encouragingly, I didn't see any abuse in comments anywhere, although this may change when these things really explode.
Authors can schedule live Q&As off their own backs. Artists can set the camera running over their art tables and get to work. Theatre companies can stage live mini-plays. Singers can sing. A whole bunch of good fan/artist interaction potential there.
These apps will surely also aid truth and transparency. Now that anyone with a sturdy data-plan can live-broadcast from their phones, it'll be difficult for The Authorities and The News to convincingly spin anything...
You could argue that no-one would watch the majority of Periscope and Meerkat videos if they were sitting there on YouTube, three months old. This is probably true. But the real frisson comes from these things being live. Anything can happen. Especially if the jackass is holding his phone while driving. Keeping track of his lovehearts and comments from the other side of the world, while glancing at the road ahead of him every once in a while... Looking at it with my worst-case-scenario writer's head, each and every broadcast is a found footage horror film waiting to happen. If you'll permit me a moment to consider the very darkest side of this new medium, we're bound to witness some deeply unfortunate and traumatic streaming. And I don't just mean that Mumbai guy. Let's hope the worst never happens on our screens, but you know, what with humans being humans and everything...
There are potentially major privacy and safety issues, if broadcasters inadvertently give away their exact location or their home address. Especially young and/or vulnerable broadcasters. I'm sure we'll see all kinds of guidelines put into place over that whole issue. Not to mention the issue of people finding themselves the subject of live feeds in public places when they really don't want that to happen.
Today, my friend Michael Moran tweeted one early example of the medium's potential misuse:
And here's one final, less obvious downside: these apps deliver a new kick in the teeth to mindfulness.
Ever since the handheld internet befell us, there has been the danger that anywhere else in the world - anywhere at all - suddenly becomes more fascinating and thrilling and exotic than where you are right now. That destructive, nagging sense that you're always missing out on something 'better'. So will we end up sitting across a table from a neglected dinner partner who looks glumly on as we view a live-feed of a complete stranger eating in Istanbul? Will broadcasters filming their Vegas road-trip suddenly stop enjoying that road-trip when their viewing figures dip to zero or their 4G dies? Are we nearing that tipping point where our experiences seem to lose meaning if there's no-one around to witness them?
No matter how cool and seductive all this live-stream teleportation might be, we'll do well to remember that our own eyes deliver constant live-streaming, ultra-HD footage of our surroundings, which gets recorded on this incredible, massive, organic hard-drive. We enjoy unlimited bandwidth until we fall asleep or drink too much. Our own necks provide us with effortless steadicams. Our senses, amazingly enough, allow us to go way beyond mere sight and sound.
We can feel cool sea breezes on our skin.
Smell and taste the salt in the air.
As our tireless quest to shrink the world reaches bold new milestones, I really hope we don't forget to stop and take regular, good hard looks around us, at the places, things and people who matter.
So. What do you make of Perisciope and Meerkat, both in terms of your preference for either so far, and their implications for our lives, good or bad? Tell me in Shrieks From The Abyss below!
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