streamy

Streamy, the personalized home page meets social feed reader, is now open to everyone. We originally profiled the company back in mid-2007. Since then it's been rebuilt and is noticeably faster. It's also streamlined the blog reading experience, which is the core of the service.

While I originally compared Streamy to Digg for the way it filtered up news stories based on who was reading and recommending them, these days it's a lot closer to FriendFeed. There's more of an emphasis on reading the content without leaving the site, and interacting with other users who have … Read more

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.

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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