Twitter is now allowing users to sign up for Periscope without requiring them to have a Twitter account. Instead, users who want to take Twitter's new livestreaming app out for a spin can open a Periscope account using their phone number.

The Periscope team announced the update via a blog post published on Medium. The update also includes a trio of new features that allow users to change their profile pictures independent of their profile picture on Twitter, reply more easily to comments made by viewers and block viewers and their comments.

The latest update for Periscope, which is now available only for iOS users, indicates that Twitter wants to get people to sign up to its six-week-old livestreaming app instead of forcing people to sign up to Twitter first before being able to use the app. In the short run, the move would not be so good for Twitter, which has 236 million monthly active users as of the start of 2015.

However, the move will most likely be beneficial for Periscope, since new sign-ups will be made by people who are interested in the app's ability to broadcast livestreams and will actually use Periscope.

Still, Twitter recommends that new Periscope users who already have Twitter sign up with their Twitter accounts, since the app uses Twitter's social graph to give Periscope users access to people they already follow on Twitter.

"Until now, you needed a Twitter account to sign up," says the Periscope team. "For existing Twitter users, we recommend signing up via Twitter (we'll help suggest people to follow based on your Twitter social graph), but we've also added an option to sign up using your phone number."

The updates come just days after Meerkat, the original livestreaming app that generated a huge buzz with the technology press, announced that it was expanding into a platform and inviting developers to build new services aside from Meerkat's native livestreaming service. Earlier this month, Meerkat also announced integration with Facebook, allowing users to publish broadcast alerts on their Facebook wall and build a network of friends by looking at their own Facebook contacts.

The addition of Facebook support is clearly Meerkat's response to Twitter's decision to notify the fledgling app that it is cutting off access to Twitter's social graph just two hours before Twitter pulled the plug.

Both apps are the biggest livestreaming services to date, and though tech journalists have created a lot of hype around both services, Periscope and Meerkat have their own weaknesses that prevent mainstream users from jumping onto the geeky bandwagon. Until then, the developers of both apps are still working on new ways to refine their apps for mass-market use.