Meerkat, Meerkat, Meerkat.

At this point in my life, when everyone starts hyping a new website or app or variety of organic lettuce, my reaction is to burrow deeper into bed and pull the covers up over my head, hoping that it all goes away. I’m too old to be trying to understand all this stuff. Honestly, Snapchat: I still don’t get it.

But following the mini-epic controversy over Twitter’s decision to make it harder for Meerkat to gain a gajillion followers in a blink, I figured I better download the app and see what all the fuss is about. It is now Monday afternoon and after a weekend of watching Meerkat streams, my eyes are still bleeding.

Just when you think you’ve discovered every awful aspect of humanity, along comes a new and innovative way to despise people you barely even know. Meerkat is that thing.

No matter how many streams I clicked on, I pretty much saw one of two things. One, someone sitting around doing nothing. Or two, someone running around talking about how they were Meerkat-ing (has it become a verb yet?) and then talking to other people who were talking about how they were Meerkat-ing.

At some point over the weekend, I realized that the apocalypse can not come fast enough. As a species, humanity has run its course, and when the asteroid hits or the nuclear experiment causes Godzilla to rise from the bottom of the Pacific and devour us all, it will be a relief. Because there will be no more Meerkat.

Admittedly, it was probably horrific timing on my part to dive into Meerkat on the weekend of SXSW. Over the years, SXSW has become a place where tech-industry self-love has reached near-pornographic proportions.

Ever since that one time Twitter launched there and became a thing (if not a real business), every attendee apparently prays that another thing will break big at SXSW so that they can say, “I was there that year when (fill in the blank) took off.”

This year, Meerkat is that thing everyone at SXSW is hoping will be the thing they can tell their grandkids about, and as a result they can’t stopping yakking about it.

Perhaps the tipping point for me was watching Mashable founder Pete Cashmore Meerkat-ing around Austin. There was someone following him carrying a Mashable Meerkat sign. He kept asking everyone around him if they used Meerkat or knew about it.

At some point, several people came up to him and said they were Meerkat-ing him while he Meerkat-ed. I felt that at one point, the universe was on the verge of collapsing in on itself and all I could think was, “Good riddance.”

Above: Even the Hootsuite owl is Meerkat-ing now.

Image Credit: Hootsuite

And then in the background, the Hootsuite owl mascot popped its head into the mix, and I began to sob.

Okay, I didn’t really cry. But you get the point. Having moved to France apparently hasn’t managed to put enough distance between me and SXSW. And now, there’s Meerkat rubbing my face in the depravity of strangers parading around deep in the heart of Texas waving their smartphones in people’s faces.

Why is Meerkat having a moment? I can only assume that it was one of two things.

First, it could be because the Twitter auto-follow thing was suddenly spamming people who then felt-digitally brow beaten into downloading the app.

Or second, there are a ton of people streaming live-porn on Meerkat, and since I don’t happen to be following said people on Twitter, I am not seeing it.

I suppose at some point, given time, people will figure out what to do with Meerkat and it might become the next Twitter, rather than the next Foursquare.

But as for me, I’m going back to bed. If civilization comes crashing down, please don’t wake me. Though I suspect you won’t since you’ll be too busy Meerkat-ing the rapture.

How it worked before:

• She's her own label, and owns the copyright / publishing rights on her own songs.
• She registered her songs with Youtube, saying "these are mine". (That's different than posting the songs publicly.)
• Because of that, when someone else uploads a Youtube video that uses her music as the soundtrack, she's the one who receives the Content-ID notification.
• She then gets the choice to block that video, or to run ads on it.
• She generally chooses the latter, which means she gets 1/3 of the revenue generated by the ads on the video that has her music in it, and gets her name on the page.

So now Youtube is about to launch a new paid streaming service. If I'm understanding her post correctly, it goes like this:

• Participation in the new service requires that your entire catalog be available for streaming, at high resolution.
• Participation requires that you not release your music elsewhere earlier, e.g., no early releases for fans or backers.
• You no longer get a choice of whether to do nothing, block a video, or run ads. Ads are mandatory.
• Five year contract.
• If you don't participate in the new service, then the option to obtain Content-ID ad revenue from the free version of Youtube no longer exists.
• If you had previously been getting Content-ID ad revenue and choose not to participate in the new service, your channel will be deleted and all videos using your music will be blocked.

This means that, for all of those people who were making a little money off of their music by letting Google run ads on it, the options now on the table are:

1. Agree to all the terms of the new service, including publishing your entire catalog on it, and continue making money on ads;
2. Block all the videos using your music (and have your channel deleted);
3. Allow those videos to use your music for free (and have your channel deleted).

It's another bait-and-switch: "We had been paying you for your work for years, under these terms. But now we have altered the agreement. Pray we do not alter it further."

This sounds like Google using the same strategy they used with Google Plus: instead of creating a new service and letting it compete on its own merits, they're going to artificially prop it up by giving people no choice but to sign up for it. Except in this case the people being strong-armed are the copyright holders instead of the end users. (So far, that is! Wait for it.)

I think you can expect to see a lot of old videos on Youtube getting blocked in the near future because of this.

"The music terms are outdated and the content that you uploaded will be blocked. But anything that we can scan and match from other users will be matched in content ID and you can track it but won't be able to participate in revenue sharing."

"All music content has to be licensed under this new agreement. We can't have music in the free version that is not in the paid version"

I had them explain it again to be sure.

"Wow, that's a bit harsh," I said.

"Yeah, I know," they said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Software is eating the world, and doing so using smaller and smaller teams. WhatsApp WhatApp was able to disrupt the global SMS industry with only a few dozen engineers. Small teams can have a big impact because software development (and deployment) has improved dramatically over the past decade. Some improvements include:

• Infrastructure. Deploying a commercial website ten years ago required significant upfront capital. Now you can spin up virtual servers in minutes. Upfront costs are close to zero and ongoing costs are orders of magnitude lower than before.
• Services. Startups created simple APIs that abstract away complex back ends. Examples: Stripe (payments), Twilio (communications), Firebase (databases), Sift Science (fraud).
• Open Source. Open source dominates every level of the software stack, including operating systems (Linux), databases (MySql), web servers (Apache), and programming languages (Python, Ruby). These are not only free but generally also far higher quality than their commercial counterparts.
• Programming languages. Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python. Moore’s Law gave us excess computing resources. We spent it making developers more effective.
• Special-purpose Special purpose tools for non-programmers. These tools let non-programmers create software in certain pre-defined categories, thereby lowering costs and reducing the demand for developers. Examples: Shopify (e-commerce), WordPress (blogging), and Weebly (small business websites).
• General-purpose General purpose tools for non-programmers. In the pre-Internet era, tools like Hypercard and Visual Basic allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. Since then, there hasn’t been much work in these areas, but from what I’ve seen that might change soon. By allowing more people to program, these tools act as a force multiplier for the software industry.

In all likelihood, the demand for software development will continue to dramatically outpace the supply. If so, “software eats software development” will be an exciting area going forward, with lots of valuable startups created in the process.

The 75th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath on Monday April 14 is a reminder of the potentially key role of literary spouses. Steinbeck didn't like his own ideas for the title, so when his wife Carol proposed a phrase from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" he adopted it at once.

This set us thinking about the impact of other partners on the history of literature. As the following examples show, though usually either dismissed as humble help­meets or complained about as posthumous image-protectors, they can sometimes decisively shape a book or career.