Streamy is downright awesome. When our own Leena Rao wrote a review following their launch two months ago, she nailed it when she wrote it was essentially a ‘personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed’. That’s exactly what it is, and it just became even more than that.
I’ve been looking for this type of service for a long time, so I signed up for Streamy right after the review, yet quickly forgot about it and went back to using good ol’ Netvibes for my feed reading needs and other (desktop) applications for keeping track of my social graph across a variety of services. That’s all history now.
I decided to take Streamy for another spin now that they have just integrated more social features to the mix, like the ability to view real-time streams from Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed inside the web-based interface as well as chat widgets that connect to your AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger accounts. Sure, there are a number of services still missing to make Streamy the ultimate social dashboard, but as far as I’m concerned this is all I need (as long as I keep Skype running too).
Streamy is really fast, which is a big part of why I like it so much. Skimming RSS feeds is a joy to do, the recommended stories were spot on, and the ability to create groups and folders is a big plus. To share stories with your friends or save them for later you can simply drag the headline of an article to the side a bit, which will pop up a menu that lets you perform a couple of actions in a very intuitive way. You can also share stories with your friends over IM by simply dragging the headline to your contacts in the sidebar.
My one gripe, and it’s a huge one: the RSS feeds I subscribed to for testing (e.g. TechCrunch, see screenshot) were not all up-to-date, with the latest item sometimes dating back a full day ago. If you’re a news junkie like I am, that’s unacceptable, so I hope that issue gets resolved soon. (Update: Twitter also doesn’t update quickly enough, not even after refreshing).
Streamy just became my new start page, and if they can fix the RSS feed delivery delay it’ll be that one I’ve been looking for so long, too.
Going to have a look at this one. Never heard of it. I have been using only the Google Reader till now. :-/
Yes, I too have never heard of this. Missed Leena’s review i think. Looks fine but have to use it to get the feel it. Late updates can be really irritating. Robin, are they doing anything to fix this?
Steamy doesn’t seem to be that fast for me. And yes, the UI is also unfamiliar. It takes a while to find out where things are. It’s good to have an option, but in term of speed–Google Reader still rules.
accidently went to steamy and found a Prn network. the name is a little irritating. im sure the service is probably great if you guys give it good marks. nice to see my neighbors in socal raising the realtime stream bar.
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I got into the beta wayyy back when it first came out. Looks like a lot has changed, I’ll have to check it out again.
ya, it has changed a lot, hope this works fine
i like it but im looking for something that is less computer dependent..make it mobile.
btw like the facebook connect
YA, you are right, it is just awesome, It is going to hit the market soon
Importing Netvibes OPML gives an error for me. Anyone else with the same problem?
Just signed up. It’s incredibly slow for me at the moment, taking ages for it to populate a page. Might check back at some point to see if it’s faster, but it won’t be displacing google reader at its current speed.
Weird, the speed is what does it for me. (using Chrome)
I’ve tried again. It’s generally very fast, except when it freezes up and never populates some widget with items, this time around it’s happening less frequently. I might just have a connection issue where I am I guess.
It is rather slick I must admit, I can see it becoming my home page if I can get around the slowness thing. Hopefully soon.
tested Streamy. Complicated interface.
A great tool no doubt but what amazes me with projects like this (and it’s not a negative toward them) is how they pitch this to investors and I guess end users
“We’re doing an aggregated news rss social live real time news feed”. People’s eyes must just glass over.
It’s only when they deliver a killer platform that it all makes sense. I’d love to know how they handled the ‘why is this different/better than xxx”
Any thoughts?
Interesting article – great stuff.
Very interesting. Feedly-like features but supports Chrome.
Cool. Looks like Streamy has a lot of potential to make it big. All that we want now is agility. So, if Streamy can provide that, then is it something to be welcomed.
has come a long way since the beta test began… the interface may seem complicated in the beginning but I kinda like it so far…
Will need to take a look, though seems to provide similar functionality to friendfeed.
Streamy sounds promising. Availability on Chrome is a big plus because Chrome is my primary browser and so far I’m keeping Firefox only for Feedly
It’s cool to chat using AIM on here, but meebo does AIM and so much more. I mostly like having a service that lets you connect to facebook chat in addition to AIM, all while saving your conversations. If Streamy got really serious about the chat portion of its services I would make the switch.
Too bad it doesn’t support IE.
Registration does not work in Opera, sigh!
Two things:
First, I like Streamy’s Friendfeed interface better than the new Friendfeed. At least I can still see the source icons.
And it is fast. Second, they need keyboard shortcuts. Bad.
We have keyboard shortcuts!
They work for blog reading as well as services. They are discussed in this blog post:
http://blog.str...ssion-and-more/
Looks very interesting. I’m trying it out now
Nice tool!
However how are they gonna make any money besides some VC funding which may carry them for a year or two?
Its nice to see good services, but we live in a capitalist society, we have to pay for resources (Programmer Salaries, Hosting, etc). I’m getting tired of seeing all of these things without a visible revenue model.
I like this, it has lots of potential, the FF, FaceBook, Twitter integration is excellent, it just needs to be quicker at it’s updates of RSS.
We have been upgrading our systems over the past two days, so feed updates have been slower than usual.
Everything should now be back to normal. Any feeds not recently updated will be within the next hour. And hourly from then on.
Hmmm. it’s that name game again. How does this square with the new web TV awards created this year called the Streamy Awards? http://www.streamys.org/go/ At some stage there will be confusion. In the meantime it looks interesting.
Impressive ! Netvibes should go that way if they still want to compete…
the only thing it is missing is a pizza feed!
lapp
http://www.worstpizza.com
Can you guys ban this guy’s IP already?
haven’t touched it since beta. its become irrelevant to me since FriendFeed has come along. further…if i really, really wanted or needed a ‘home page’ i’d probably take the netvibes or igoogle route. preferably netvibes and my 15 custom tabs.
@Keith Bennett – You’re right about the slow RSS updates. I’m used to getting "real time" updates through FF.
It took about 5 minutes for my twitter feed to update.
And the UI for removing widgets, wow.. not intuitive at all. Maybe for someone who’s used to draging around boxes.. but the more logical convention would be to at least have an X or something
Yeah that’s what I thought at first. But I like that it’s unconvential, and I got used to it pretty quickly.
Just tried it…buggy at best…couldn’t load FriendFeed and homepage was stuck at empty…
no problems importing FriendFeed into Streamy here.. posts came in right away once i added my key. After the initial import it’s a shame that FF updates don’t come across sooner though.. somewhat delayed in arriving
Signing up now, from the intro video looks more for me then google reader.
Just signed up. Initial impressions: the interface is really nice. It took a bit of poking around to figure out things. For example, I was looking for a substitute to Google Reader (especially after reading this review) and I had to dig deep to find where I could import stuff from Reader.
To the PMs at Streamy: You guys should have a link at the top (preferably a red one in bold) that pushes you to a wizard which runs you through the process of connecting your external accounts (FB, Flickr, etc.) and also steps you through importing other RSS content. Otherwise, no one is going to want to put in the time to move their content over.
Just finished importing from Google Reader. Ugh. What a mess. Folders aren’t setup. I’m not sure I want to go through all this effort to move RSS services.
The fact that the groups from Google Reader are lost when imported to Streamy makes the move to Streamy …well… impossible.
Didn’t really test the import to be honest, wanted to start from scratch. Moving from one feed reader to the next gives you that opportunity.
Your folders from Google Reader should be retained when you do an import.
hey thanks for this heads up. This will be good
Doesn’t work for me. I signed up, confirmed my subdomain and the captcha, then get stuck on new.streamy.com for ever. Tried refreshing page, shutting down browser etc. Probably too much crazy javascript going on for it’s own good.
stuck on new.steamy.com as well. something much cooler could have happened after all the hype…
Ya, same here.
Never heard of this one, thanks for the heads up.
“” “” – kim
OInce you’ve registered the new user page doesn’t load after 5 minutes and several retries. The name makes it sound like a site for young girls. Can’t comment beyond that since the pages aren’t loading, even in FireFox or Google Chrome.
Thanks for bringing us such a great site. NOT! Streamy FAIL !!!!
Not so awesome…I signed up for it, and can’t get in. After I login successfully it just sits there trying to redirect me somewhere. I looked up on their getsatisfaction link and lots of people are having this issue. I’m using FireFox 3. Thanks for wasting my time.
Ive signed up and only get a grey box on the screen.
Having the same problem on FF and Safari.. No love..
FF3: Can’t get past http://new.streamy.com. Kind of a problem.
I think Streamy is currently being updated or taken down for maintenance.
Probably not the best timing given that this techcrunch story just came out about them and people are trying it out for the first time…
It’s back up now.
Loved it when I set it up this AM….now it has a Fail Whale. Maybe they didn’t know they would get a whole buncha new users this am?
does that 2nd screenshot have a headline that says “nigger black pudding?” – or am i just thinking racist.
I clicked on “sign in” (there’s nothing to tell me where to register, so I guess clicking on “sign in” would take me to a registration area).
OK, so I did that, then there’s a field at the bottom saying “Create an Account” – cool. I entered my email address, clicked on “confirm” button, and then I see this :-
Error
Sorry, an error occurred. Please try again later.
Ah well.
Sorry everyone! We experienced a technical issue this morning that has now been resolved.
Please try logging in to streamy.com again. If you are still having problems, let us know @streamy on twitter or at GetSatisfaction.
We apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks for checking us out!
Hey Robin, thanks for revisiting Streamy. We were actually in the middle of an upgrade when we noticed a nice boost in attention!
Looks like Jonathan has addressed some of the issues you guys have experienced, but we’ll do our best to keep it operating smoothly.
We’re currently fundraising to make Streamy realize its full potential – we have a great team and plan. Investor inquiries are welcomed.
Thanks again guys!
I liked it the first two day, but for the last three all I get is this error: “Streamy encountered an error and must be reloaded. We apologize for any inconvenience.” I get it regardless of browser, network location, or computer. It never reloads, just repeats the error. Not being able to use it has significantly reduced my experience satisfaction from cool to useless.
I hope they get it to work, the idea and presentation is good. The FF display looks just like your normal feed display. Twitter and Facebook are done very well and having MSN there too is a good idea. It’s annoying about the slow updates and also that you can’t change the default news feeds, but overall it’s very impressive and one to keep an eye on.
I’ve seen the video in the post. It looks great an I’ll give it a try
No Google Reader sync = useless imo, feedly looks better this way.
facebook has no myspace sync = fail
Awesome. works for me. Interface takes some getting used to, but once that’s done, it is slick!