Twitter Cuts Off Meerkat’s Access To Its Followers

With Twitter buying its own live-video streaming company Periscope, the micro-blogging giant is doing all that it can to limit the fanbase of its competitor Meerkat.

The Twitter-centric live video broadcasting platform Meerkat was gaining traction and seems it was not going down well with Twitter. However, this was expected with the latter’s tighter integration with Twitter. As in Meerkat piggy banks on Twitter followers.

Not surprisingly, Twitter has started to cut off Meerkat’s access to Twitter followers, also referred to as the social graph.

So how it is going to affect the users? By far, new Meerkat users could login using the Twitter email and password, and they would automatically have access to all the Twitter followers on Meerkat, and they’d be following the users back. It made Meerkat appear as a natural extension of Twitter.

According to Techcrunch, Twitter has confirmed the change: “We are limiting their access to Twitter’s social graph, consistent with our internal policy. Their users will still be able to distribute videos on Twitter and login with their Twitter credentials.”

Meerkat co-founder Ben Rubin talking about Twitter’s move says, “a sad day for the Twitter developer community” but a “small bump for meerkat.”