Twitter Gave Meerkat Two Hours’ Notice before Cutting Access

In case you are wondering what Meerkat actually did via Twitter&#x27;s API:<p>- Auto-follow @appmeerkat on twitter when you sign up<p>- Auto-enable push notifications for @appmeerkat&#x27;s tweets when you sign up<p>- Auto-tweet when you schedule a stream<p>- Auto-tweet when you start streaming<p>- Auto-tweet when you comment on a stream<p>This is the entire disclosure they offered: &quot;Everything that happens on Meerkat happens on Twitter&quot;

The backstory here is that Meerkat downloaded users Twitter friend lists (or &quot;the Twitter social graph&quot;) and used it directly to send unsolicited messages to them?<p>If so: burn them with fire.

A counter argument: Uber breaks rules, a large number of people have no issue with it and consider it fighting an unfair regulatory system. These guys break the rules on Twitter and everyone sides with Twitter.<p>Now, I&#x27;m on the side of Twitter in this one, but I think it&#x27;s an interesting thought experiment. To me the difference is that they ended up bothering Twitter&#x27;s users (as seen by the comments on this thread), whereas Uber just bothered cab drivers, cab company owners and medallion holders - a relatively small audience that has pissed off a lot people.<p>There&#x27;s also the issue of whether Twitter has a monopoly in the same sense that the cab companies do.

&gt; the Meerkat app will no longer be able to automatically push notifications that announce the live event to all of a Meerkater&#x27;s Twitter followers.<p>Good. If &quot;people I interact with twitter autospamming me every time they use an unrelated service&quot; becomes A Thing then I might as well not use twitter.

Anyone who builds applications built on Twitter&#x27;s or Facebook&#x27;s APIs deserves whatever treatment they get.<p>I&#x27;ve never seen companies that treats their API partners with as much disdain as those two companies.

&quot;I get it that when you own the house, you own the rules,&quot; Rubin says. &quot;You can say, I’m about to launch my own app, and I don’t want you to have the graph. But I think the two hours was a little aggressive and not working toward building a community.&quot; A little bit spot on. This is some kind of bullying.

Really, at this point, I think you&#x27;re certifiably retarded if you build a business even tangentially relying on Twitter or Facebook. This is exactly why people stopped doing it <i>years</i> ago. Why is this surprising to anyone?

I wonder if they strategically waited to do this at SXSW, or if they just saw abuse reach a critical point.

I don&#x27;t quite get why it matters if he got 2 hours or a week. Was he going to build a Twitter clone in that time?

It&#x27;s a cool app, but there&#x27;s been a huge degradation of my stream now that it&#x27;s littered with |LIVE NOW| posts and out-of-context replies. Neither of which is fixed by this unfortunately.

As much as Meerkat&#x27;s spam tactics downgrade my level of sympathy, I still think this is pretty awful behavior on Twitter&#x27;s part. The list of people I follow is, essentially, personal information about me and them, contributed by me. I shouldn&#x27;t be prevented from accessing my own information with the app or service of my choice; it shouldn&#x27;t be part of a corporate fiefdom.<p>Still waiting for the first attempt to test the legal waters on scraping Twitter.

No one likes spam, but invitation channels are certainly drying up. I sometimes wonder how fast Facebook would have grown if email spam filtering in 2004 was as aggressive as it is today, especially considering that its early growth was among .edu addresses.<p>(Remember that this was back before Gmail and often your email client did the bulk of spam detection, if not all .. though my memory is a little rusty)

Not that I care for what Meerkat was doing, but isn&#x27;t this sort of a selling point of Fabric?

The original author included a misplaced modifier &quot;only.&quot;<p>Despite their poor grammar it should have been included here.

So Now the Meerkat&#x27;s awesome feature soon to get replicate by twitter itself?

I&#x27;m surprised they even got a notice

And it has nothing to do with Periscope.

If you are going to use Twitter to grow your business, at least be a little smarter about it. There are plenty of other ways to get yourself out there over Twitter without spamming users.