What we’ve called Y Combinator’s European clone, Y Europe, has let loose with their first startup, Soup.io.
Soup.io is very low friction take on life streaming that serves as an aggregator for a lot of your public social media feeds. There are a lot of startups trying to do social aggregation (Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser). Paul Buchheit’s highly automated FriendFeed looks like one of the best so far, but Soup.io is another easy to use alternative despite being manual.
Without needing to sign up, you can easily combine feeds from services like: Flickr, Digg, LiveJournal, Delicious, eBay, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vox, YouTube, Zoomr, or any other RSS feed. Soup.io also has a bookmarklet that lets users easily add content to their feed from around the web, turning it into kind of a tumble blog. All the feeds are displayed in dated order on a customizable profile page. Signing up means you can connect with friends, follow their feeds, and link your feed to your own domain name.
Each of these “life streaming” services is applying the news feed paradigm to the web, but not wrapped in the same sense of place and purpose as Facebook’s social network. Most life streaming services are just really simple RSS readers or replace a bunch of social networks with another somewhat clunky meta one. However, as social sites open up their information, services like Soup will benefit and the real question will change from how to aggregate your content, to what really interesting services you can run on top of them.
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It actually looks pretty nice, but I think new startups are over-concentrating on lifestreaming. Niche is narrow enough without twenty services competing for users.
There’s so much competition, yet these startups keep on flying out the door with something not all that different. It then comes down to marketing… picking the right groups of people who’ll benefit from the site.
docstoc also came out today - first thing I thought was, “isnt this sort of like scribd?” But their focus on professional documents definitely helps.
Let’s see if this european version of y combinator goes anywhere.
May the best streamer win! Would be fun to see a startup that creates a new shift in the marketplace instead of another “me too”.
Jon
Oh, great. A feature-reduced clone or a feature-reduced clone of Plaxo Pulse. Check out recent TechCrunch coverage: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....se-widget/
I think it’s a shame that there are only 5 comments here to give the big “we don’t care” to Europeans. They’re people too.
This soup is sour and cold.
Have I ever told you people that this “social” stuff is a fad?
ttp://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Recently has found in the Internet very interesting service PageZest.com http://www.pagezest.com the Simple and easy homepage. There already there are links to all most popular sites and services. All is conveniently distributed on blocks. On a site registration is not necessary, there there are searchers (Google, Yahoo), the blog and a social network.
There is even a section “video tools” and “interesting services”, it is very useful!
What is necessary?
I with pleasure have put this site as a homepage, and to you I advise!
A very nice user experience: the fact that you can incrementally build you soup and get instant feedback regarding the changes you are making is really nice. I am however unsure about the value of the result. I think that activity streams are much more valuable in the context of application like facebook because facebook has enough context to aggregate and filter this information.
As the comments before said, it’s an already overcrowded market, with little to no chance of any of these startups actually generating revenue (which becomes an important question once *all* that investment Yeurope puts in runs out). How is this any different and how can they expect to compete with what Friendfeed, Tumblr, Facebook, Google, 30boxes, blah, blah, blah and blah are already doing in this space AND turn profit?
As I also thought when Yeurope was first announced, a Ycombinator clone without a
the experience and network Paul Graham brings, especially in a market as hard as Europe, leaves me asking Whybother?
All in all though, best of luck, hopefully this post gets them some investment to keep them going.
Sound good, there is no need of sign-up, I will have look on this.
I’m not a part of this team, but I’m an Austrian entrepreneur, too. So, here we go:
Competition: Of course, there’s a lot of competition going on. But none of the Silicon Valley-startups concentrates on the European market. And yes, the European market is different from the Silicon Valley. Even more - the Austrian is different from the UK market, which is different from the French market.
Europe is a difficult area for Silicon Valley-startups.
So: Yes, Soup.io has a lot of competition if you look at it from a worldwide view. In Europe itself, Soup.io only competes with German Twitter-clones.
So the question here is if they can manage to compete with German Twitter clones, rather than with FriendFeed.
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YEurope is a pretty interesting idea. No, they haven’t got the experience Paul Graham has, but they are there, they have a several good people on board, and they fund very interesting projects.
And please rate each of them separately. Soup.io is a lot different from the second start-up I know from YEurope (which still is in private beta). I don’t know about Soup.io’s business model, but they sure have one. Paul Böhm, the founder of YEurope, isn’t like Paul Graham, funding whatever looks funny. (Services like WriteWith, which are just plain useless, have to compete with the big guys, have no business model and no chance of success.)
Soup.io kind of is like tumblr, but on the other side, I really like the interface (it’s very KISS) and the fact that you can do so much with it without signing up, importing etc.. Especially the “no sign up” part is a great plus, since everyone else tries to profile the user right from the start.
For me, this is also the first time that watching a “livestream” has been almost as addictive as Flickr’s explore.