Streamy Finally Available To Public – as Shiny and Beautiful As Expected

In this hyper-connected world that we now live in news and everything related to news gets tons of attention from just about everywhere: we still have not found any perfect way to consume news from dozens and hundreds or even thousands (for some) sources of information even despite of the fact that there are various aggregators and social news and recommendation services already available.

Yet Streamy caught everyone’s attention easily back in summer of 2007 (!) when the guys behind the startup came up with a very beautiful idea and even better implementation for this idea: social consumption of news that really looked to be done right. I took part in the initial closed beta testing of the application but it took the guys quite a long time to finally get their product to the stage where it is ready to be available for everyone to use (and that is quite understandable as I know what loads the RSS aggregation-related application like Streamy must work under).

So today is the big day for Streamy as everyone will have a chance to see for him- or herself if the somewhat forgotten buzz about Streamy deserved attention and if it was actually worth waiting for it to be launched for so long (18 months in private beta).

The private beta testing period included 2,000 users reading and sharing news on Streamy with a total of 20,000 people who requested the invites (but of course not all of them had a chance of getting in as it was really a limited beta testing). Those people who were let in generated impressive activity on Streamy: they added a total of 25,000 news sources and viewed over half a million of stories on Streamy saving and sharing them with other users. Streamy’s crawler is told to process RSS feeds at very high rates and has already processed over 100 million of items (and this number will be rapidly growing now that they are opening up to the public and numerous users will start adding multiple new feeds).

So for you to understand what Streamy is if you have not participated in the beta testing, it is a service for personalized news reading as it offers people to consume news by following individual sources, people, or interest groups. On top of the news consumption process Streamy offers powerful communication tools that allow you to share every news piece with people and groups and have real-time discussions around content with other users.

Actually I would not tell that Streamy offers something truly revolutionary in terms of news consumption - all the features have probably been here for quite a while in different products. But the way the functionality is introduced with the streamlined interface and powerful technology that ensures very smooth experience for Streamy users certainly makes Streamy unique and if it is reliable enough for many users to read their news here simultaneously it has all the chances to be appealing to many people who are not 100% happy with how they currently read news.

Now that Streamy is officially launched, we will also see deeper integration with other services like Facebook and Twitter. For example, new users are encouraged to sign in via Facebook Connect to immediately connect to all their Facebook friends who are already on Streamy. Besides, in addition to sharing the news via internal chat functionality users are now offered to share remarkable pieces on Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed or Facebook. To me this is one of the most appealing features as usually sharing an interesting post on a number of services takes much more hassle than it does here.

I am not quite certain if people who currently use Google Reader for news consumption will switch to Streamy right away but I can certainly see Streamy as a viable alternative to SocialMedian as it offers excellent options both for discovery of news and also sharing and discussions around the news that are definitely superior to those of SocialMedian. All in all, the very sexy look and powerful technologies behind Streamy make it one of the most appealing RSS aggregators I’ve seen.