Jeff Benjamin

A few days ago, we posted about Meerkat, a new live video streaming service that is currently enjoying a significant buzz amongst the tech industry. The primary reason for Meerkat's success has to do with how easy it is to get up and running. You can literally go from installing the app to live steaming in mere seconds. Meerkat has Twitter to thank for much of this, because the app basically piggybacks on Twitter's already existing account and social graph infrastructure.

That said, it was largely assumed that Meerkat's free reign access to Twitter's social graph would be short-lived, and this proved to be true. As noted on Buzzfeed, Twitter has cut off Meerkat's access to automatically port over twitter connections—those who you follow and those who follow you on Twitter.

The Twitter social graph was key in helping Meerkat generate the buzz that it's garnered over the last week and a half. Prior to this evening, when users signed in to Meerkat with their Twitter credentials, all of the connections that existed on Twitter were ported in to Meerkat. This made it extremely easy to establish existing connections, receive notifications when fellow twitter followers joined and began streaming, and essentially provided a zero-friction environment.

After this evening, this is no longer the case. Yes, this is bad news for Meerkat, as it significantly narrows its spout for growth, but it won't necessarily spell the death of the service.