The launch of the Twitter-owned Periscope last week got a lot of people excited, and the app quickly seemed to surpass Meerkat in terms of popularity. Even so, not everything was perfect. The app was notification-happy, firing off alerts for every new follower. The initial experience was somewhat confusing as well, simply showing a collection of seemingly random streams when users logged in.
The 1.0.1 release of Periscope addresses these issues, starting with notifications — new follower notifications are now turned off by default. This is a quick fix, and the team is working on tweaking notifications further. “We need to make the overall controls here more granular. We’re on it,” the Periscope team wrote in the Medium post announcing the update.
The overall browsing and watching experience has been improved as well. Streams from those you follow are now pinned to the top of the watch tab, and a “Featured” section has been introduced to “highlight unique content.” An issue where broadcasts weren’t being tweeted was separately addressed by the team, but not in the form of an update. Instead, the post links to a post on Zendesk helping users to troubleshoot the problem themselves.
One major concern for a lot of users was the fairly revealing nature of Periscope’s location sharing. From the start it was possible to turn off location sharing entirely, but for those who do decide to share location information, the 1.0.1 update has made it less precise by zooming the map display out a bit farther.
The team also took time to reflect on the app’s rise in popularity and the amount of content shared in just one week’s time. “We built Periscope to let people discover the world through someone else’s eyes and in just a matter of days have taken us all around the globe — to nearly every country in the world.”
Periscope is still iOS-only, and while Android is on the way, no further information on that has been shared. The Medium post addresses the question of when an Android version is coming with a simple answer: “Soon! We’re working on it.”
