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 also read that same story. Where FriendFeed makes you jump to the site where the content is hosted, Streamy simply loads it within an overlay pop-up which also lets you comment, bookmark, and share it with friend.
New for the open beta launch is support for Facebook and FriendFeed. If you're a user of either of these services you can plug in your user credentials and it will pull in the latest stories from each, which to FriendFeed users may seem a bit odd. The added benefit of using Streamy over FriendFeed to corral all this information is that it throws in live chat and an RSS reader. Beginning next week you'll also be able to send anything you've bookmarked or read into your FriendFeed stream.
This was a really standout product back in 2007, and I worry that it may have lost some of its relevance since then. Where it has real potential is with its recommendation system for blog posts and the fact that it includes so much in one place. I don't know of any other product outside of a Web OS solution that manages to have live user and group chat, a news aggregator start page, full RSS reader, and a feed directory within the same enclosure. The closest thing is Netvibes, but that doesn't offer nearly as many options for re-sharing content without being noisy.
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.
The front page of Streamy shows off the hottest stories of the day, along with story recommendations for you based on your RSS subscriptions and what you've clicked on.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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 can build up your own set of RSS feeds and see what your friends are up to in real time. There's also a built-in IM component to let you chat and share story links without leaving the site. Streamy has its own proprietary IM network for Streamy users, but it also lets users log in to other IM networks like AIM.
The front page of Streamy gets its stories from the most-read items by Streamy users. In that regard, it's similar to Spotplex [review], although from the looks of the preview screencast, it offers a whole lot more.
No word yet on when Streamy will be opened up to the public. In the meantime there's a defunct signup page, and a whole lot of blue.
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