SXSW Interactive’s big winner: Meerkat, probably

The problem is, that almost never happens. Typically, it’s a group of apps competing for attention in a specific space like location checking in or group messaging.

But for 2015, it seems pretty clear that Meerkat was the app on the tip of everyone's tongue at SXSWi. The San Francisco-based app, which allows users to broadcast live streaming video and/or audio from their mobile device and let people know about it via a Tweet, was used in several panels, probably most notably for comedic effect in the Julia Louis-Dreyfus "Veep" presentation. It also got attention as an underdog against Twitter, which made moves (badly, badly timed moves) during the festival that would limit Meerkat's functionality. The Internet did not take that well and, ironically, Meerket got a boost from that attention.

If Meerkat is a joke, though, don't tell Mashable's Pete Cashmore or biz phenomenon Gary Vaynerchuk, who seem pretty convinced that it's the real deal.

Austin's Spredfast provided the American-Statesman with some data on Meerkat adoption at the fest and social media mentions.

Let’s take a look!

Day-over-day adoption of Meerkat during SXSW looked like this:

Spredfast says there were about 268,000 Twitter mentions for “meerkat” since the start of Interactive.

Notably, two-thirds of the mentions are actual video streams, not retweets. The top streams were from Mashable, Jared Leto, Kellin Quinn and Jimmy Fallon.

Are you using Meerkat? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.