Review: Streamy

Streamy aims to bring your social networks together in one place, and give recommendations based on your “personal interest profile.”

There’s a video that summarises Streamy’s main features: About Streamy.  The track in the video is Iz-Us by Aphex Twin — they’ve clearly got good taste, but I hope they’ve got permission to use that music!

Setup

Streamy’s an early adopter of all the safe ways to interface with social networks.  OAuth is used for Twitter, which means Streamy doesn’t need to know your username or password.

Setting up the connection between Streamy and Twitter looks like this:

Easy, and no password required.

Customisation

Each page is displayed as a set of panels, with controls for managing columns and drag and drop reordering.  Removing a panel is slightly awkward; it must be dragged to a cross icon at the top-right of the page.  I understand that they want to keep the interface simple by not showing a delete/remove icon on each panel, but it doesn’t seem as intuitive.

Apart from that minor quibble the interface is intuitive: status updates automatically load more when the bottom of the page is reached and drag and drop works well for widget management.

Basic Usage

Streamy displays an overview of your social networks in one place.  I set up Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.

This lets me post status updates to multiple social networks:

Notice that Streamy also counts as a social network in their list.  Streamy features both friends, chat and group chat, which means you can find and add people within Streamy.

Recommendations

The home page displays news recommended for you, based on your profile.  It’s picking up a lot of geeky stuff for me, which is about right to be honest:

It doesn’t seem to offer recommendations for friends, but seeing as the service has built in social networking features I expect they’re working on this.

Social Network Integration

Each social network is represented in-depth: Twitter has the standard features you’d expect: direct messages, @replies; even trends and search.  Flickr also works well, showing friends activity and custom search widgets.

Conclusion

Streamy’s going to make sense to a lot of people.  It’s a richer experience than sites like Ping.fm, without being bloated.  It’s more focused than Netvibes: integrating with social networks rather than generic widgets makes the interaction between networks more natural.

I’d like to see it support multiple accounts for each service (those of us with business/personal Twitter accounts are always asking for this), and perhaps colour options or themes.