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Preview: Streamy--yes, it's a Digg killer

I'm not going to beat around the bush here, Streamy is a Web service I've been looking forward to getting my hands on for some time now. Well, to be exact, it's been just more than a month since I first heard about it, from a mysterious YouTube video that caught my attention. I was lucky enough to get an invite to the still-private service earlier today. I've been testing it for the last hour or so and am already impressed. Not because it looks really flashy (which it does), but because it has the groundwork for a very socialized surfing experience without requiring you to install a new Web browser, or discontinue using services you're already familiar with.

In a nutshell, the service is a hybrid between Digg, Facebook, your favorite instant-messaging client, Google Reader, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. By its very name, Streamy is a mashup service. It pulls together a variety of your social streams: be it your favorite blog feeds, news alerts, or friends updates, and rolls them up into a slick package.

On the social networking and bookmarking side of things, every user gets a profile and an online presence. You can fill the profile with all sorts of information about yourself, but the real clincher here is a listing of what feeds you're subscribed to and groups you've joined. The feed reader itself lets you subscribe to as many RSS feeds as you'd like and view them all without having to leave the page. If there's any embedded content like video or music players, that comes along for the ride too.

If you find anything interesting while browsing, you can share it in several ways. There's the typical "e-mail this" option and quick links to publish it to the Streamy community, to a group you're a member of, or your friends. Much of the interface is drag and drop, and as an "aha!" moment earlier, I shared something with another Streamy user by simply dragging a story headline onto their buddy icon. Cool.

I intend on giving Streamy some more of my time to really get a feel for how it handles a huge influx of feed subscriptions and a growing user base as the service opens up. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the interface. There are several more after the jump, so be sure to click the "read more" link below.

Site down? Try Mr. Uptime

An unfortunate side effect of having your blog or Web site hit by sudden, massive traffic of the type you get when linked to on sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit, is downtime. While bad for the person who owns the site, it's also the pits for people who want to get at the content and can't. There are services such as Duggmirror, and Google's cache to bail you out, but otherwise you're out of luck. Mr. Uptime is a new Firefox extension from the folks at Pingdom that lets you earmark downed … Read more

Social bookmarking explained with hand gestures, puppetry

Some Web 2.0 concepts don't make sense to people unless you break it down to them in ways they can understand. We do our best with our Newbie Guides for things like Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, and Facebook. Along similar lines comes a video about Del.icio.us, and social bookmarking in general, from Common Craft--a consulting company that does Web videos. This may be viral marketing, but it's very well executed and a joy to watch. I'd hire these guys for my start-up video.

[via Digital Inspiration and DownloadSquad]

Walk2Web is an experimental, fascinating "search" tool

Part of what differentiates blogging from print media is the option to link to external Web sites to offer readers additional information--something you just can't do as easily in a newspaper or magazine. While the Internet is also known as the World Wide Web, in terms of blog links, things end up looking more like nested hierarchies. A new search engine called Walk2Web aims to let users explore these hierarchies as part of an interesting visual journey, that lets you see where each blog is linking.

To begin, just enter a URL. It can be an entire site URL, … Read more

Mister Wong launches English version of social-bookmarking service

The first question that pops into my head when checking out new social-bookmarking services is, How does it stack up to Del.icio.us? It's one of the most popular social-bookmarking services, and also one of the oldest. Mister Wong is the new kid on the block. It's a social bookmarking service that's been around in Europe since early 2006 and claims to be the second-most-popular bookmarking service worldwide. It launched the English version this morning, and I think it's good enough to make a mark in the bookmarking crowd.

Like other bookmarking services, Mister Wong … Read more

StyleMob: Fashion police for the Web

While people without clothes on dominate a great deal of traffic online, the same can be said about those with clothes--otherwise known as the world of fashion. StyleMob, a new social network for street fashion, is opening up its doors on Thursday. Aimed mostly at female users, the service is a social network about clothes and people who like to show off their outfits. Users can pick who has the most style, and submit their own outfits or fashion inventions for others to rate and comment on. There's also the virtual equivalent of a fashion police with groups of … Read more

Browsing for dummies made pretty: Fichey

Fichey is a new approach to serving up content that's been popularized by social bookmarking services like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit among others. Similar to DuggTrends, and other sites that cache Web pages that have gone down or become incredibly sluggish due to a high traffic, Fichey's solution is to take a snapshot of the page, sans links, and serve it up in a slick Flash viewer. Pages can be viewed one at a time, and have a slick rotation animation similar to Apple's Front Row. All you have to do is go back and … Read more

Streamy: The do-it-all RSS reader

Here's a new service I can't wait to use--in part for its good looks, and also for its attempt at combining several different news and social services together in a user-friendly manner. It's called Streamy, and the easiest way to describe it is a mashup of Google Reader, Meebo, Del.icio.us and Twitter. The emphasis however, is on Web content, and how to make it both easy to read and share with others.

Like AOL's Mgnet, which I took a look at yesterday, Streamy provides customized newsfeeds based on your interests and viewing habits. You … Read more

Customize Google will save your time, security

We realize not everyone uses Firefox to browse the Web, but for those who do, there's a really great extension that's been getting a lot of buzz lately. It's called Customize Google and it does just that. You can customize every service Google offers, from basic tasks such as automatically redirecting to the secure versions of Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets, to actually adding links to other search services such as MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. Social bookmarking nuts can also add links to services such as Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us, right … Read more

Grouptivity pulls social bookmarking card

Grouptivity launched an updated version of its content-sharing tool on Monday. Blog posters can now add a "discuss this" button on the bottom of any post, which will pull up the Grouptivity sharing dialogue to send off the post or article to others. This dialogue allows you to pick from various pieces of media (photos and videos) that you want to share, along with a full text copy of the content. There's also the option to send it off to multiple e-mail addresses, set up read confirmations, and author explanatory messages to your recipients.

If you've … Read more