Meerkat’s CEO believes the app will continue to thrive despite Twitter

Meerkat looks to be one of the next big apps and, despite the fact that Twitter seems to want to kill the app in the womb, CEO Ben Rubin is confident that Meerkat will continue its impressive level of success. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Meerkat enables users to stream live videos from their smartphones and automatically tweets a link to your stream to your followers. Seeing as this would compete with a similar app that Twitter acquired, the company decided to try and cripple Meerkat. 

If Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin is at all troubled that Twitter has just made using his app a little more cumbersome, he’s not showing it. In case it’s passed you by, Meerkat is a mobile app that’s caused quite a stir just recently. Launched for iOS, the free software lets users stream live videos from their handsets, with tight Twitter integration helping it to pick up a decent following in the three weeks or so since it launched. On Friday, however, Twitter revealed it’d acquired a similar though as-yet unreleased app called Periscope. Hours later, the social media company said it was limiting Meerkat’s access to its social graph in accordance with its internal policy, a move that stops Meerkat users automatically linking their Twitter followers, effectively slowing down Meerkat’s ability to grow via the social media service. “Twitter’s move here shows how significant Meerkat has become,” Rubin tweeted when he heard the news.