Lights Go Out For Streamy, Founders Flock To Facebook And Zynga

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Alas, personalized news streaming service / social network aggregator Streamy hasn’t been able to find a buyer willing to pay what the two founders were hoping to get for the assets, so the startup is shutting its awesome Web app down – for now.

In a short notice posted online, Streamy says it plans to “hold” the service and “reinvent it when the time is right”. In the meantime, however, both co-founders of the fledgling company have been forced to go out and look for a slightly steadier job. One has landed at social gaming juggernaut Zynga, the other at social networking juggernaut Facebook.

CEO Don Mosites, for one, is heading to Zynga to work on a “new, special project”. He won’t tell me what it is, but he promises it will be “big”. To be continued, I suppose.

The other co-founder of Streamy, Jonathan Gray, will be joining David Recordon (previously with Six Apart) and Monica Keller (previously with MySpace) and become part of the social networking giant’s open source division.

From what I can gather, Gray will be helping Facebook promote the adoption of projects like HipHop, Cassandra, Tornado, Thrift, and others. He’ll also continue working with HBase, which was the Hadoop-driven data back-end for Streamy.

Company: Streamy
Website: streamy.com
Launch Date: February 15, 2007

Streamy is a real-time personalized news site. Our service aggregates news and activity, helps to filter it, and lets you share easily.

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Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Company: Zynga
Website: zynga.com
Launch Date: July 2007
IPO: NASDAQ:ZNGA

Zynga was founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus and is named for his late American Bulldog, Zinga. Loyal and spirited, Zinga’s name is a nod to a legendary African warrior queen. The early supporting founding team included Eric Schiermeyer, Michael Luxton, Justin Waldron, Kyle Stewart, Scott Dale, John Doerr, Steve Schoettler, Kevin Hagan, and Andrew Trader. Zynga’s mission is connecting the world through games. Everyday millions of people interact with their friends and express their unique personalities through our...

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