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.
