Twitter tried to cripple its newest video rival Meerkat, but Meerkat started fighting back

Meerkat's latest update delivers on Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin's promises to introduce new features to the live-streaming app, and they go a long way in making it easier for people to connect with their friends.

Meerkat, which makes it extremely easy to broadcast live video of what you're doing via Twitter, used to be able to plug into Twitter's user data in order to make it easier for new users to find their friends. But after Twitter acquired an unreleased Meerkat competitor called Periscope, Twitter shut off Meerkat's access, which left Meerkat users without an easy way to discover other users.

"We need to provide users a way to discover more people and search more people," Rubin told Yahoo's David Pogue, according to The Wall Street Journal, adding that Twitter had "escalated our decision-making a little bit forward."

Meerkat has since delivered on those promises, adding the ability to manually search for other Meerkat users and implementing a news feed that shows Meerkat streams that are live or scheduled for later.

There's also a new way to invite other people to follow you, which allows you to create your own Meerkat page by combining your Twitter handle with Meerkat's domain. All you need to do is insert your Twitter handle at the end "meerkatapp.co/" and you'll be all set.

By creating your own Meerkat follow page, you can share the web page with your friends on social media sites outside of Twitter, who can then click on the image to automatically follow you on Meerkat.

There's no doubt that Twitter's limitations have crippled Meerkat for now, but thanks to a team that's cranking out updates at lightning speed, Meerkat is proving it's willing to work quickly to make a comeback.

You can download Meerkat over at the App Store, or read our interview with Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin right here.