97 Subscribers

Yesterday I managed to bag myself one of the extremely rare Streamy invites… all thanks to a retarded comment I posted over at Mashable – We were asked to post something funny, and we had a chance of winning one of 24 invites. My comment was “I deserve a streamy invite as much as George Bush deserves his Presidency…. no wait….”.

Anyway, I thought I’d give you guys the skinny on Streamy as most of the reviews I’ve seen around are all from the big blogging sites like Techcrunch, and I thought a layman’s point of view may be appreciated. :)

Overview

Streamy was plugged as the “Digg killer” prior to its release, however after using the site for a while, I realise this isn’t really the case – not in a bad way… but here’s why: Streamy is basically a news aggregator like the Google Reader, but merge an improved Meebo, add more AJAX, an intuitive interface and you prettymuch have it.

Its not going to put Digg out of business, but you can use it instead of Digg entirely (if you remember that Digg is prettymuch second-hand information… Streamy allows you to get it straight from the source). The cynics among you will probably still add a Digg subscription like I have – after all you’re not going to read the source for every Digg submitted.

Site Design

Streamy’s design is clean, intuitive, easy to read, easy to browse and there’s no advertising (yet). The site is prettymuch all AJAX, which makes everything run super smooth… however as with all AJAX, sometimes there are some components that load later than others – I’ve only seen this once on Streamy though, so I’m impressed so far.
Useability

As I’ve said before, the site is very intuitive, and the AJAX reacts very well in all aspects. When you’re viewing a particular RSS stream (lets take Kotaku for example), you get that site’s Favicon on every story, the site name and the date/timethe story was published in each instance. Streamy also supports attachments, so if any stories have images in them, you get the thumbnail to the right of each story.

Adding RSS feeds is easy (under the subscription tab to browse each stream by category, or you can just click “Add subscription” in the subscriptions column if you know the URL). You can also add folders and categorise your subscriptions, which is a very nice touch. You can load just one RSS stream into your main window, or you can load an entire folder into the main window – I love this feature… I can load all my gaming feeds, or all my techie ones.<3

Anyway, once you have a story open, you get navigation options at the top, so you can flick through the stories from that site with ease. You can also drag the story onto a friend’s name in the network column to share it – another awesome feature. :)

Speaking of the network column – you can actually use this as an IM messenger like meebo – click on a contact to open a window… and you can even drag stories into the IM window. :) You can also drag more than one contact into the chat window to create a live chatroom.

Verdict

I love this site – this will quite happily replace Digg and Google Reader for me… the clean design and interactive feeds, as well as the very responsive AJAX make Streamy one of my favorite sites on the web.

I recommend you beg, steal, cheat and backstab to get hold of a beta invite ASAP – There is an invite system built into Streamy, but its not active yet… so as soon as it does, I’ll blog about it and offer to give them away. :)

I’ll be adding images to this post later, as unfortunately I’m at work – so remember to check back later this evening for a nice look at the site. Until then, you can view the Streamy Webcast on YouTube for a sneak preview of the site. ;)

Edit: Added images

Popularity: 3% [?]

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 07:56 and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.