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Exclusive: Streamy Returns for the FriendFeed Era

Posted by Internet Guru
October 29, 2008

Streamy, a gorgeous online news reader, is making a comeback for the FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook era.

Streamy’s new mantra: cutting through the online noise with personalized recommendations, groups and custom filters. It’s a single view for all your blog subscriptions, Twitter feed, FriendFeed and other inputs, with the ability to post updates back to services like Twitter, Digg, Delicious and Facebook without leaving the site. Like FriendFeed, you can add comments to every item, but you can also open an IM window and chat in real time. Look out, too, for a customized startpage ala iGoogle. We spoke to the company yesterday about the changes, which are summarized in this video:

Feature Versus Service?

All your feeds and streams in one place?

That’s appealing. Posting back to those services remotely? Also great. And yet Streamy’s greatest strength is its biggest weakness: it’s so feature rich that it will end up in competition with everything from Facebook to FriendFeed to iGoogle to Google Reader to Ping.fm. It’s also all about the interface; and as we saw with Plurk versus Twitter, a great interface doesn’t necessarily lead to massive user growth in this distributed era.

Interface Versus Platform?

Interface-driven portals are windows on the web: fun to use, but not core services. Sure, you’ll type Streamy.com in your browser when you want a rich feed-reading experience, but how does your usage get others to sign up? How does Streamy become deeply integrated in the web, rather than being a pretty distraction?

The secret, I think, is to ensure that people sharing items from Streamy across the web are also unwitting marketers: items appearing on FriendFeed that read “John shared this link from Streamy,” shared items on Facebook that explain “Jim used Streamy to share this link.” The company is, I’m sure, already aware of this requirement.

Talent Buy Possible

And yet even if Streamy can’t become deeply integrated into the web, the future isn’t dire: Streamy’s small team (two people, at last count) has proven time and again that it excels at user interface design: an “acq-hire-sition,” where a larger company buys the talent rather than the product, is a possible outcome even if the product doesn’t gain a huge user base.

The new Streamy is currently in testing with a handful of beta testers, and a full launch is expected in November, the company tells us. You can leave your email address on the site for an early invite.

From mashable

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