Everybody knows about the competition between the live-streaming video apps, Meerkat and Periscope. When Meerkat first launched using Twitter’s social graph, it became quite prominent. But Twitter themselves really put the number to Meerkat when Twitter launched Periscope. But Meerkat has decided to turn to another social friend for help.
On Wednesday, Meerkat began to give users the ability to sign up using Facebook instead of Twitter. For any Meerkat users who haven’t used the app in a while, don’t fret, as you’ll still have the ability to sign in with Twitter, so if Twitter is how you initially signed up, your login information will still work with the app. At this point, Meerkat will simply have an extra option for sign up.
There were a total of three updates that Meerkat announced this week, and the Facebook link up was just one of them. There is an added “Cameo” feature that allows video hosts to invite a member of the audience to temporarily take over a stream, letting them create a Meerkat Library to privately store video streams.
Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin told TechCrunch said that the app’s connection with Facebok won’t notify Facebook friend of such activty, because “Twitter is in real-time where Facebook is not. That’s why we chose not to do that and instead focus on your friends and interests.”
Recently, Facebook has been surveying users about their use of Meerkat, because the social network had to cooperate for the connection to be implemented, meaning that Facebook isn’t planning a rival service.