Streamy, a real-time news reading and sharing site and social activity aggregator, has launched the public beta of its platform. We wrote about Streamy at the launch of the site’s private beta in 2007. As we wrote back then, Streamy is a personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed.
Like Google Reader and FriendFeed, Streamy lets you follow news, blogs, Digg, and import RSS subscriptions from your Google Reader account and then share them with your friends. The interface is fairly innovative, allowing users to create widgets for searches, easily organizing different searches on various platforms. You can also drag and drop anything on the page, thereby creating shortcuts to blogs and sites. Like before, Streamy has a nifty feature that provides news and blog recommendations for you based on your behavior on your Streamy site. Streamy takes into account the types of news feeds you subscribe to, what you are commenting on, and what your friends are reading. Similar to Google Reader’s new feature, FriendFeed, and Facebook, Streamy also gives you the ability to comment on news items that have been shared by friends.
Streamy also has a couple of social networking features added to the mix. Like FriendFeed, you can integrate tweets from people you are following on Twitter and status updates from friends on Facebook. The site allows you to share stories from your site with friends across other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Last.Fm, and FriendFeed and through Streamy’s on-site chat feature. Unfortunately, the Facebook Connect feature has not been implemented yet and will be rolled out in the near future. The chat feature is pretty innovative but it also hasn’t been implemented fully yet. Co-founder Don Mosites says that the chat feature will eventually integrate Gmail’s GChat and AOL’s AIM only. Mosites says Streamy isn’t trying to create a whole new social network, but is trying to build off of other social network platforms, and is encouraging users to sign in using Facebook Connect.
Streamy’s missing some key functionality at this point, which makes me wonder why the launch wasn’t postponed until key features like Facebook Connect, are live and running. Especially given the fact that the private beta launch took place close to two years ago. But Streamy has an interesting concept when it comes to the ability to recommend news and blog sites for users and offering the chat feature. Regardless, FriendFeed seems to have mastered combining the social activity aggregation with importing RSS feeds. And FriendFeed lets you import your contacts with almost every social service with an API or RSS. It’s hard to beat that.
Here’s a video on how to use Streamy:
I’m not preaching “techcrunch is going downhill” but I am seeing a lot more typos lately. I have typos on my blog but even posts are full of typos these days.
IDK just an observation. Love the content.
“As we wrote back them, Streamy is a” Them? shouldn’t that be then? I’m not an english major. just a friendly commentator.
go away grammar troll
as far as communication is effective and message is sent across, who gives crap about typo
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I’ve played with this site for a few months and it’s slick. You need to use it first hand to see how easy it is to share files on streamy.
Back when TC first wrote about this, I loved it. I actually emailed with Jonathon Gray the cofounder some. I was worried though, given the huge lag from first write up, to launch, that they had died.
I wonder, however, how this will make money? Another fun app, and no revenue.
Anyone else have problems importing blogs from Google Reader?
Using the site to aggregate RSS feeds and share them with friends is very intuitive and a pleasure to use.
Jonathan Gray and Don Mosites have done a fantastic job on this site. They have put in lots of hard work over the last two years.
These guys are a shining example of the technology innovations coming out of Los Angeles startups.
I wonder how large the development team is? Scaling back resources helps when your in the refinement phase of software development. I’m personally finding out that just before launch there are sure to be things that you know you need – good reasons to ramp up staff again for specific functionality.
From a marketing perspective sometimes it’s just better to launch. The big obvious holes will get filled and then you have something to talk about in the second, third and forth media blitz. Release core funcitonality, release early and often. From what I’m hearing, maybe Streamy missed an opportunity to release.
If I had to take a guess though, I would say that the delay was probably operational in nature. In the period of time since their launch many things have changed in the cloud computing space. With a decent set of people in closed alpha I would just retool the backend to low cost operationally. They might have done this (pure speculation). Given the nature of the application they would require BigTable like functionality and that’s probably not what the alpha was coded against.
Just 2 cents from a guy who is actually building this kind of stuff on the cheap.
Well I’m definitely not the market for this, but I have to say, having watched the demo, that’s a heck of a lot of clicking! Those of us who use vim for editing and set up our window managers with elaborate keyboard shortcuts to minimize mouse usage would jump off a bridge after a hour with Streamy.
Awesome, I absolutely love being able to get news, blogs, Digg, and import RSS subscriptions from my Google Reader account and then share them with my friends. Awesome.
“Compatability
Sorry, your browser is not currently supported.”
Doesn’t support IE7 . . . Nice.
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A lot of these class of services seem to depend on a knowledge of RSS that is beyond the understanding of most mainstream web users.
I’d contend that RSS is one of the key Web 2.0 technologies that is yet to be understood more broadly by the web population…and that’s an indictment of personalised news services’ poor design metaphors.
My dad doesn’t need to understand IMAP4 or POP3 to use email, so why does he need to comprehend little orange icons and RSS feeds to personalise his news experience?