If I were to pen my own list of products I love and use every day, Streamy would be somewhere up top. I only started using it 8 months ago when the Web-based personalized news network / social network aggregator added more communication features like instant messaging, and it instantly became my new start page.
Sadly, the team behind the application secured only a modest round of angel funding in 2007 and again in 2008, and has been unable to raise follow-up funding last year. The fledgling company is now running out of cash, and is looking for another party to keep it alive and continue development on the app. And boy, do I hope someone ends up doing just that.
The reason why I like Streamy so much is because of its versatility. The service basically marries two daily routines of mine, RSS reading and social networking, fits both of those activities in a single, attractive user interface and bolts a ton of sharing and communication features on top of it. Think FriendFeed on steroids.
You really have to try it to get a feel for it, but for me Streamy is the main reason why I stopped using desktop applications for keeping track of Twitter, Facebook and my RSS feed subscriptions. It’s far from perfect, but there’s a lot of potential to the idea, and in fact I don’t understand why players like Seesmic and TweetDeck haven’t tried combining classic RSS feed reader functionality alongside the aggregation of social networks. Contrary to what others claim, I don’t believe Twitter and Facebook is the death of RSS, and Streamy is a great example of how the two could (and should) be able to co-exist.
Anyway, 2009 sucked Streamy dry, and co-founders Don C. Mosites and Jonathan Gray have given up trying to convince investors to inject capital into the startup. Mosites also tells me they had a bit too much ambition for Streamy, and that the product as it is know is still far from what he and Gray had envisioned when they kicked off development.
Fortunately for me, the service won’t be shut down in the near future, and apparently some potential buyers are already in discussion with Streamy about a potential purchase of the technology, team and brand. I’d be hard-pressed to find a single application that can replace Streamy for my own content consumption and social networking needs, so here’s to hoping one of the interested parties comes through. Pretty please?
