Nir's morning Meerkat live stream and ask me anything

Good morning. Let me know if you can hear me. If anybody's watching yet. I'm trying out my new fisheye lens that I bought just for meerkat. Let me know what you think of this new view. By the way. Here's, here's the difference. Here it is without the lens. See? A little too close for comfort if you ask me. And here it is. Oh, There. Which one do you like better, fisheye or regular? I'm thinking the fisheye. This is pretty cool actually. It looks a lot better, I think. But let me know what you think in the comments. Yeah, so can you hear me okay, by the way? Let me know. Okay, great. So Saul says they can hear me. By the way. If you could like this, that would be terrific as well as retweet this. This would all. That would always be great because the more you like it, the more you retweet it, the higher my ranking goes, the more people watch this, hopefully the more I can spread the message around how to build habit forming products and how to use habits for good. That would be terrific. So I'd appreciate any liking and retweeting. Thank you very much. I see a few folks. Ben, thank you so much for doing that as well. And I'll keep doing them too, if you guys like it. That's terrific. So let me start. I like doing these. Ask me any things by first giving you an update about what I'm thinking about and what's kind of going on in my life and my morning. This morning I did a great run along the Embarcadero here. Let me show you where I ran today. Hold on one second. So I ran along the Embarcadero. Here we are in lovely San Francisco. And along my run today, I was thinking a lot about the upcoming Habit Summit and how meerkat might affect conferences. So I'm wondering, and maybe this might be a good article, whether meerkat is going to do to conferences what Napster did to the music business. Because I was at south by last week and it was very interesting because I went to many sessions at south by myself. I wanted to hear from the speakers as well. And I was shocked by how difficult it was to actually get into a session. I mean, this was particularly at the Marriott in Austin. But session after session that I went to was not only was the room full, but there were hundreds of people standing outside the rooms just waiting to go inside and they couldn't get in. And I was oftentimes one of those people. So I tried on the first Day I was in Austin, I went to four sessions and I only got into one. How ridiculous is that? Thankfully, I got to go on a speaker pass. But if you had just paid $1,400 to go to south by Southwest and you only got to go to 25% of the sessions you wanted to go to, I am expecting you would be pretty disappointed. And so here's what I did during my session that I was speaking also with Natalie Nahi and Roger Dooley. We had a line of about 150 people who could not get into our session. And so I decided to play a game of telephone. I told the first person in line that we would be live streaming that entire session, and the only way to see was going to be through meerkat. I didn't know of any other way to do it quickly. And so I told everybody in the line to pass it down to use meerkat so that you don't actually have to go in the room, just watch it online. And we got over 330, something like that, of that meerkat session, by the way. I also gave the phone to the person in the front row, asked a nice gentleman to tape it for me. And so we got to see. We got all these people to watch our session that weren't there. And this was when meerkat, I mean, meerkat's now really exploded. But even the first few days of Southwest, it was kind of a murmur. I was telling everybody I could about meerkat, but a lot of people still hadn't heard about it. But now it's definitely, you know, it's for sure been the app of the year, as far as, you know, this, this south by. So now it's kind of been more readily used. I saw Snoop Dogg was using it this morning. He was live streaming from his session at South By. And so that made me think, wow, you know what, what happens to the future of conferences when basically you can be at any conference? I'm sure that at the Habit Summit on Tuesday, people will be meerkat again. And actually, I think I'd encourage that. Right. If it's sold out already, don't we want people to kind of be able to tune in? I think it'd be great. I'm thinking I'm considering maybe meerkatting the entire session. Let me know what you think about that. Is that a good idea or is that a bad? Is that going to piss off people who bought tickets to the Habit Summit? Are they gonna think that's not worthwhile that they paid all that money to come to an event and now it's being live streamed for free. The counter argument is, yes, it's meerkatted, but you know, this is ephemeral. It goes away. It's not going to be recorded. You can only tune in if you're watching at that moment. And also, really, I think that the reason people come to conferences is what I call attention retention. And really, you can sell. It's becoming increasingly difficult to sell information because information wants to be free. By the way, if you know who said that, who said information wants to be free? Free. If you know who said that, can you please email me or tweet? Who said the quote, information wants to be free. I really want to know that. But to go on with this tangent here, so if information wants to be free, then people are going to broadcast, people are going to share, people are going to tweet anyway, what's going to happen. But it's interesting because I think people won't pay for information as much as they used to. Right? Information. Because the barriers to getting information are going down. People will pay for retention of attention, that people want their attention to be caged. So I'm going to write an article soon about this, but we want to go to experiences that kind of constrain our attention because that's when we actually can think and can get work done. And so the real value of going to a conference like the Habit Summit is not just the speakers, because their content is out there. The real value of going to college is not the information. I mean, it's stupid to go to college to get the information. You can get everything that's about a particular topic that you can take a class in online with videos you can read, books the professor probably already wrote. So there's no reason to go to these institutions because of the information. The reason you go to these institutions is because they cage your attention because they force you to concentrate without all these external distractions. And so, yeah, let me know what you think if that's a good idea to broadcast. I'm still kind of on edge because it's so new. I'm not sure if I want to do an official meerkat livestream of the Habit Summit next week, but I think I might. So that's in the works. If you're just joining us, I kind of just gave a brief summary of what I'm thinking about this morning and I appreciate. Thank you so much. By the way, for those of you who are retweeting and liking this, but please do. That's great. It helps me raise up the ranks. It also helps more people join the session and hear from me in the future, which I very much appreciate. So please hit the like button there as well as retweet for me. And with that, let's go take some questions. So let's see. Thank you. By the way, for those of you who said you like my book, I appreciate it very much. I'm actually working on an article right now that came out of a discussion I had with Ben Rubin, the founder of Meerkat, about how Ben used or the whole team used the hook model in creating meerkat, which I'm really excited about. So thank you very much for the nice comments. So let me just scroll thi. You know, there's one thing that I keep complaining about Meerkat is how hard it is to keep up with the comments. But let me actually go back here and see. Oh, thank you. By the way, Phy. Xavier Stuart Brand from the Whole Earth catalog, that was. Who said that first? Very good. Thank you so much. See, this is why I love the Internet. Because when you have a question, see, information wants to be free. I love that that both Adam. Adam Mash and Fizavier both said Stuart Brand. But wait, somebody else says that it was Linus Torvald. So. Oh, I might need to go search online to make sure that that is correct and verify who said information wants to be free. Terrific. So if you have any questions, I would love to answer anything so we can do a little Ask Me Anything for the next few minutes. I'm scrolling through here. I really enjoy this live streaming format of just getting my thoughts out there, sharing what's going on. The latest and greatest I'm thinking about getting feedback from readers and listeners is terrific. I've also been posting these YouTube these videos. I save them when it does save. Sometimes meerkat's kind of quirky and doesn't let you save. But I've been posting them on YouTube. If you missed apart and you want to go back and see them or see my past meerkats, you can do that. Unless I really screw one up and say something I'm embarrassed about, then I won't post it on YouTube. But anyway. All right, so questions here. Thinking on Periscope. That's a great question. I don't know. I think that it depends how aggressive Twitter wants to be. I am convinced that this live streaming format is a big deal. This is not going away and it's Been around for a while. I mean, there's companies like Ustream and there was several. Quic was another company that did live streams. So there's been many other companies that have done this. I think Meerkat really pulled the lid off of how easy it is to broadcast with one click. This ephemeral nature and most importantly, what Ben told me in the interview that he did at my house when he came over, most importantly is the fact that it goes out to your stream and provides this instant, variable reward of seeing who's watching. So as a broadcaster, Ben was all about the broadcaster. He really wants broadcasting to be rewarding immediately. So when I send out a Facebook message or a tweet, I don't get immediate gratification. That's part of the investment phase for the hook. But Ben wanted to turn the broadcasting into the reward so that instantly when I take this one action of hitting the broadcast button, the stream button, I immediately get this amazing feedback of now 52 people watching, which is amazing. And of course these comments. So that's not going anywhere how Periscope is going to play into all this. And I'm dying for Periscope to give me an invite. I've requested one, but I haven't got one yet. So I'm still waiting for it. I haven't seen the experience itself. You know what, what, what will happen, of course, is that, you know, Twitter has a vested interest in Periscope now that it bought the company. And it's going to be very interesting how they manage that product versus Meerkat. I don't think it's a done deal. I don't think just because Periscope was bought by Twitter that they don't have a war to fight here because Meerkat is growing like mad. It's only, what, three or four weeks old and it's just taking off now that the app is featured by Apple, I'm sure their growth is crazy right now. And so when you think about bigger companies, platforms buying other companies that they just couldn't compete against, we see this story repeated time and again, right? We know that Facebook tried to buy Snapchat, got rebuffed. They did their own version of a Snapchat like feature that made the photos explode. That didn't work out. So now they're kind of stuck. Maybe they'll compete again head to head or figure out something. But they obviously wanted to buy Snapchat when they couldn't compete with it. It remains to be seen. I'll tell you what, if Periscope doesn't go live soon and Meerkat hits this critical inflection point where now, because it's network effect business, more people are using Meerkat and this is the place where influencers want to be. It's all going to be about the influencers, it's all going to be about the broadcasters and which platform they choose to use. So if I know that I can start streaming with Meerkat and I'm instantly going to get an audience, well then it's going to be very hard for Periscope to come in and take me away and change that habit. It's all about how much of an audience the broadcaster can get. So if Periscope comes out soon, I think that's bad news for Meerkat. But if Periscope takes its time and they over optimize and they work on this feature and that feature and they don't get it out in time, I think that Meerkat has a chance especially, and this is what I told Ben Rubin that I would recommend him focus on, especially if they can focus on the investment phase of the hook. They need to figure out the easiest way to build their own social graph. And so, for example, right now, many of you who are watching right now may not be following me on Twitter, you may not be following me on Meerkat. It needs to be easier for you to instantly follow me for next time so that next time I decide to broadcast that will load the next trigger. If you're familiar with the hook model, the investment phase of following me loads your next trigger. The next time I decide to. Yeah, I'll be in just a minute, thanks. Alright, thanks. Sorry for the interruption. There I am at somebody's restaurant in Palomino waiting for a meeting here at the quarter of the hour. So anyway, that's really what I would focus on. It's going to be all about the investment phase, about building their own graph, because they are totally dependent. Live streaming is going to be totally dependent, not just on the viewer, but on the broadcaster. That's the most important hook when it comes to these live streaming services is going to be creating a habit, not with the watcher, but with the broadcaster. And so that's really what the team at Meerkat's focused on. And I'm pretty optimistic for them. We'll see. Of course, who knows? There's lots of things that make for a successful company. It's not just engagement, it's also growth, it's also monetization. So they've got A long road to ride. And so there's a lot to be seen if they actually survive and thrive. So let me go back and take some more questions while I do that, please. Like this and retweet. I'd appreciate it. As always, that helps me kind of build the audience here and make sure I can get the message about habit forming products out to more people. So I appreciate any likes. Thank you for those who have. Let me see other questions here. If meerkat gets big enough, could it ditch Twitter and build its own chat feed? That from MJ Gallagher 86 yeah, I think it absolutely could. I think that's what they're desperately trying to do. They're trying to build their own graph. Right now they're no longer able to build that graph off of Twitter because Twitter shut that off. Now they're trying to build their own graph. And so that's what we're going to see them desperately trying to do over the next weeks here. That's their only hope of survival, I believe. Let's see what other questions. Thanks by the way for all the retweets and likes. Pixel Punisher. Appreciate that Jared. Thank you very much for liking. I really appreciate everyone liking and tweeting this. Let me see if I can find one more quick question. They really need to fix the feed. That's my biggest gripe with meerkat is that it's too hard to keep up with questions. So you know what I'm gonna do? It's about 11:15. I have a lunch meeting here in a bit. I really appreciate you all tuning in. I'm gonna keep doing this. If you like it, let me know in the, in the comments. Let me know on Twitter if you like it. And you want me to keep doing these, these morning meerkats, I'm trying to keep up with them. And if you have any questions, you can always go to my blog@nearandfar.com and you can shoot me an email or you can schedule time with me on my blog. I do 15 minute, minute increments every single week for an hour a week. Anybody who wants to talk, you can always schedule time with me there. And with that I will say goodbye, thanks and have a great.