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. → Read More
If I were to pen my own list of products I love and use every day, Streamy would be somewhere up top. I only started using it 8 months ago when the Web-based personalized news network / social network aggregator added more communication features like instant messaging, and it instantly became my new start page.
Sadly, the team behind the application secured only a modest round of angel funding in 2007 and again in 2008, and has been unable to raise follow-up funding last year. The fledgling company is now running out of cash, and is looking for another party to keep it alive and continue development on the app. And boy, do I hope someone ends up doing just that. → Read More
As a writer covering the tech industry, there are a couple of websites and services that I would classify as downright essential for my job, including some VoIP/IM communication tools and my e-mail application of choice (Gmail).
Apart from those, I consider an RSS reader to be such a vital tool for me as well, both on a private as a professional level. Add to that Techmeme, which has an algorithm in place designed to weed out the best and/or most talked about news stories related to the tech industry out there, and you can tell I have a pretty solid set of tools readily available that enable me to keep tabs on what I want and need to be tracking closely.
New to the arsenal of tools at my disposal free of charge is Tech Investor News, which despite its not-so-sexy name is exactly what it sounds like: a news site that investors in tech companies – plus industry pundits and reporters – should be made aware of. → Read More
Here’s a question that’s been running through my head ever since Michael posted about FriendFeed being in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses: exactly how many startups out there are trying to be the one social networking service aggregator to rule them all, and how many is enough?
It seems like every day startups come up with new applications, be it for desktop, Web and/or mobile phone, that essentially want to be the gateway to our online lives. In reality though, there are not that many people who want – let alone need – continuous access to multiple social networking services, and even if they do, how many people (outside of the tech industry) do you know who are genuinely waiting for a extra third-party that helps them manage all their online personas? → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
Streamy, which we wrote about last week, is sending out early beta invitations and I had a chance to be one of the first people to poke around on the site. The video we included in that post still shows a very current user interface, and the feel of the product is very close to what is shown there. Or click on the image to the right for a very large screen shot of the home page. Streamy takes features from many new web startups, but it is not a competitor to Digg. No voting to drive stories to the top, for example. It’s a personalized news service and social network. Digg isn’t personalized. It’s news for the masses based on popular opinion. At its core, this is a social network, where adding friends is the first order of business. Once you have friends, you can share news items with them, and get recommendations from them via email or a built in, Meebo-like instant messaging service. You also need to build out your profile. Do this by adding a picture and personal information, joining groups, adding feed subscriptions, etc. A screen shot of co-founder Donald Mosites’ profile is here. Streamy, The News Recommender But Streamy is all about the news, and the social network is there to spread the good stuff. Like many who’ve tried and failed (see the discussion under “Mgnet” on this post), Streamy is offering a personalized news service. News items shown to you on the home page are based on it’s idea of what you will like. It takes into account the types of news feeds you subscribe to, what you are commenting on, and what your friends are reading. Above the recommendations, though, are the top stories. This is the only place where Streamy will compete with Digg, in pushing popular stuff to the masses. The stories are image-driven (see top of first screen shot above). AOL also went this way with their new Mgnet product after a lot of user testing – people like pictures, apparently. Each news item can be commented (very similar to what Newsvine is doing), emailed, or dragged into an IM conversation. Users can also set up topic-based filters to drill down to stuff they really want to see. Is It Viral? I’m sticking to my initial opinion of Streamy (“It is well designed, has lots of intelligent features, and → Read More
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. → Read More
