But that's not the Meerkat and Periscope I'm talking about. Two new live video streaming services using Twitter have recently been announced, and they are taking the digital world by storm. Meerkat was first and was the darling of this year's South by Southwest trade show in Austin, which is famous for launching big social media hits like Twitter and Foursquare. Meerkat used the Twitter platform to share live video.
But Twitter clearly was already at work on this and launched Periscope not long after, in the meantime degrading Meerkat's ability to use Twitter.
I have to admit, if it wasn't for my friend and colleague Bill Boyd, I'd probably still be in the dark on these two new options. But Bill is way out in front and has been blogging about it ever since Meerkat first popped its cute little head up. His latest post on it, appropriately, is called "It's a New Day."
Why do we think this is so important to you -- those of you in emergency management and crisis communication? We've been talking for several years now about the role of social media, Twitter in particular, for enhancing situation awareness. Because you have millions of people out there with smartphones on the scene capturing images, sharing information, you have an unprecedented opportunity to gain insight and information into what is going on in a wide variety of emergencies and crises. But there's a downside: What if it isn't true? That power for people to share what they know, think they know or want you to think they know is almost unlimited in scope. Bad news, rumors, lies and misinformation will travel half way around the world before old Mr. Churchill can come close to getting his pants on. That means for communicators it's not just an option, it is an absolute necessity to monitor and respond quickly.
Now comes live streaming. OK, it's not completely new. My old company was handling Web communications for BP and the U.S. government during the 2010 oil spill. Following congressional demands, we were asked to make it possible for the world to see the live video feeds coming from a mile beneath the surface from video cameras on the ROVs. At one time there were 12 live video feeds being streamed from massive servers. The cost of bandwidth was astronomical.
It was a technical challenge to provide those live video feeds to a world eager to see. Now come Meerkat and Periscope. Live video feeds are now possible from the pockets and purses of the nearly 2 billion people who have them. It might not be a big difference between snapping a photo and sharing it with millions on Twitter or Instagram. And Vine has been with us for a while. But these two new apps are likely to turn the world on to live, real-time sharing like nothing else. And that means more opportunities and more problems for those in emergency management.
