107 Subscribers

For a long time I’ve been looking for a website that houses absolutely everything I look for in a personalised start page… and for as long as I can remember, I’ve had to settle for iGoogle. Don’t get me wrong – Google’s start page is absolutely stellar, and I can almost absolutely everything from feed reading, to checking Facebook, updating Twitter and so on.

However for a fair while I had also been eyeing up a contender for it’s replacement in the form of Streamy. You may remember the site from my previous review of the site that had a fair bit of attention.

Anyway it’s been a fair while since I’d used the service, and I decided to check it out again, and discovered that the devs had revamped the site’s look and functionality. After having a chat with site co-founder Jonathan Gray, I found out that they had “quietly launched” out of beta, and hadn’t yet advertised the fact. This is great news, as I highly recommend the site to anyone – and here’s why.

The site looks great, and loads fast. New features include built-in social profiles that allow you to view activity streams from each service. The incorporated services are Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Friendfeed & Flickr – You can also update each service and share content directly from the site. These all work great, except for Facebook which seems to have issues loading the activity stream sometimes.

Another new feature is a messenger integration, allowing users to log in to MSN messenger, AIM, YIM & Google Talk without having to leave the site, or install any software. This makes the site perfect for sharing news stories in this manner.

Check the messaging window at the bottom right – this “iconifies” if you minimise the chat. Click here to see

During the beta the site was modular in a similar way to iGoogle, in that you could specify the amount of columns & populate the columns with whichever RSS stream or category you liked. This facet is still present, but has been improved to include social widgets from the aforementioned networks as well. This means that as well as my normal feed list, I can have my latest Tweets, and the front page Digg stories all on the same page – talk about added convenience! (check the first screenie for an example.)

The other features about the site are still all there – being able to read stories without leaving the site etc… though this doesn’t apply to Digg – you’re redirected to the regular site so that submitting your Digg is possible. All in all the revamp is a welcome one, and with the site newly out of beta it means that all and sundry can register and use it! There are only a couple of features that are missing from my possible perfect site… and this is me just being picky:

• The ability to Digg directly from the site
• Being able to sync your Google Reader feed list

(The last one is really just me wanting to use the service so that my read items on Google Reader are kept up to date as well, but hey, we can’t have everything!)

If you haven’t already, please check the site out and if you’d like to, feel free to befriend me there.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 00:29 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.