There isn’t much out there about new startup Streamyyet, other than the screencast above, a TechCrunch Forums post and writeups from a couple of blogs. It’s a social news site, with customized pages for each user and the ability to add friends and share links/stories.
It is well designed, has lots of intelligent features, and is almost sure to drop into obscurity immediately after launch. Lots of casualties in the customized news space (see paragraph 3 here).
Thanks for the tip, Orli.
I like the Streamy’s IM feature. It’s the best prat of the site! Besides, good ajax!
I’m getting so tired of these sites. What real benefit does it give me or the broader public? I must have about 10 sites I belong to that are meant to simplify my web life. I just can’t add another one.
I agree with your statement Mike:
“sure to drop into obscurity immediately after launch”
This is the first video demo of a web 2.0 startup that actually got me watching from the start till the end. From the video, if all features were in place now, Streamy is going to be a good contender against Digg but with a lot more community interaction and content customization.
Did I see social bookmarking and Twitter style functionality there?
Michael I think you will find that Personal news is a valuable and important problem domain that will generate enormous value (for both users and founders) when the right form-factor/implementation is found. You only have to look at Amazon recommendations to see the value of real personalziation demonstrated.
Streamy, Thoof and others are taking on the challenge – but predicting their premature death probably does not help their cause.
Predicting their premature death sure will energize their founders and developers though
Everyone wants a piece of the social networking/news pie. 2 years ago most people relied on blogs to spread links and things they liked to their immediate friends via blogs. Now there’s pownce, tumblr, twitter, etc that serves essentially the same function – broadcast to a select group of people.
Its always good (for the end user) to see competition, no matter how crowded the circle is. Its unfair to predict that streamy will drop into obscurity based on one screencast, much like 9 years ago google was just another obscure search engine trying to gain traction.
If it delivered exactly the way in the screencast, I would definitely be interested in switching over. As would many of my friends. Promise big but deliver bigger. Its up to streamy to surprise us all.
For the active news consumer like myself, Streamy presents an easy and intuitive way to quickly scan and share articles with others who have similar interests. It doesn’t matter to me at all that there may (or may not) be sites like Streamy already, or whether it will ‘kill’ digg, etc. These are industry-watcher abstractions that have nothing to do with whether or not I find Streamy useful and fun to use.
@Chris and mosites, exactly. I certainly liked what I saw in the video, as did many others whom I showed it to.
Streamy if you’re reading this, surprise us. I’m looking forward to Mike taking back his words.
Blimmr – I’ve eaten my words before…see Twitter and Ning, among others. Happy to do it.
Very cool tool! As the title said a mixture of everything with nice design!
Looking forward!!
“It is well designed, has lots of intelligent features, and is almost sure to drop into obscurity immediately after launch.”
Oh please, stop being so biased to other projects, they are obviosly well funded, intelligent and producing a very good community site. Why are they almost sure to drop into obscurity?
Wow, looking forward to this. Looks very, VERY promising!
Two thoughts…
One – well, of course you never know what will happen to a company. Just because it enters a crowded market, it doesn’t mean it won’t fly. Also, sometimes companies shift gears and run into something they didn’t expect. We entered this market just a few months ago, were advertised as “yet another Digg clone”, then shifted, were advertised as “create your Digg clone” and now people are doing a lot more than creating “social news clones”. Take this for instance. Is that social news? I don’t think so
Two – I heartly disagree with thte statement from commenter #2 saying that it will “be a good contender against Digg”.
Why? Digg, more than anyting else, it’s a community rather than a service. A very large one, a very diverse and decentralized one, but a community. It is very difficult to challenge a community to switch to a different service as long as the current one serves them well. You can build a similar service and create a (different) community, but that wouldn’t challenge Digg.
That’s why I don’t believe any of these services should ever be labeled as “Digg killers”. Less killing and more building
This looks slick.
Mike, annoying that you basically have already signed the death notice for this while getting all excited about theyrebeautiful.com
@RBA: What are your thoughts on building a new community versus utilizing the resources of one that already exists?
People with a lot of time on their hands could probably squeeze in another social bookmarking network IM thingy on their already long list of social bookmarking network IM thingies. I must admit the interface is pretty nice. They could die before they reach puberty, but I’m pretty sure they’ll live a good life.
Wooo!!! must say a very cool content aggregating application, cool visual impact, amazing usability all in all a cool stuff to check out.
Once google and Yahoo complete their mashups of myspace and facebook and others – respectivly
– all these little ones that don’t get included in the yahoo or goog mash will flail like fish out of water
Mike’s right. This thing has a market of 1000-5000 people, max (basically, bored techies with news-OCD). The pissed off people in this comment thread of course belong to this market. Like Streamy’s founders, they don’t see this product won’t catch on with healthy, productive people…
word @ RBA
This kind of post is the reason I visit TC…but they are few and far between. I wish you would cover more unfunded startups like this.
#16 – Building a new community requires, among other things, patience – something I think we all know but many people don’t seem to have nowadays. I built a site back in 1999 that after one year it only had 15.000 reg. active users. Many people would have called that a failure. But we kept on going. Today, 7-8 years later, it has over 12 million active users. And we didn’t burn out millions of $$. If we did, we probably would have closed in 2002.
Now, answering your question, of course that using an existing community is better and easier than starting it from scratch, but only as long as you’re providing an added value to that community. If your goal is to steal the existing community and make it your own, then I’d say you’re already starting it with the wrong goal in mind. Large companies can afford to take a market by storm. Small startups seldom do, and when they do, it usually wasn’t their original plan. Like I said before, it’s better to build than to kill. YMMV of course.
Guess it’s the new trend: Mixing everything up and give it a relatively “better” design. Anything new?
this looks like feature overkill. i already waste enough time with digg, reddit, and google reader. i don’t need another (excessively complicated) feed reader with shiny, unnecessary features.
Mike A: I wonder if you’re dismissing this a bit early in the game. I can see immense utility for this kind of service embedded as part of larger offerings inside businesses looking for filtered, shared content. If it lives up to its promise, I could definitely see promise for placement under a variety of business models. But to safeguard customers, I’d want a ton of safeguards because as others have said and I guess you acknowledge as well, it is darned hard to pick winners and losers in this space.
I’m at least grateful that enterprising folk are out there attempting to find solutions that have a clear utility for business. Because that’s where the millions of licenses get sold. Not one at a time in consumery environments. IMO.
not to mention that if they do get big, they’ll be sued into oblivion. they’re ajax-framing other articles in their own page. there’s only been 1 lawsuit regarding this issue, but the parties settled.
But what’s with the name? Although the service looks nice and all, the name doesn’t have any appeal. Not that it has to be some weird web 2.0-ish name, but ‘Streamy’? Guys, change the name into something more catchy and you have a winner.
It’s funny how DIGG drop the Streamy article from the FRONT page right as it was getting more diggs by the second.
Socialitico! is another (flash, social community based) social bookmark website that will compete in this market.
I look forward to Streamy, I’m really tired of Digg’s censorship.