Social RSS reader Streamy now open to everyone

Streamy, the personalized home page meets social feed reader, is now open to everyone. We originally profiled the company back in mid-2007. Since then it's been rebuilt and is noticeably faster. It's also streamlined the blog reading experience, which is the core of the service.

While I originally compared Streamy to Digg for the way it filtered up news stories based on who was reading and recommending them, these days it's a lot closer to FriendFeed. There's more of an emphasis on reading the content without leaving the site, and interacting with other users who have also read that same story. Where FriendFeed makes you jump to the site where the content is hosted, Streamy simply loads it within an overlay pop-up which also lets you comment, bookmark, and share it with friend.

New for the open beta launch is support for Facebook and FriendFeed. If you're a user of either of these services you can plug in your user credentials and it will pull in the latest stories from each, which to FriendFeed users may seem a bit odd. The added benefit of using Streamy over FriendFeed to corral all this information is that it throws in live chat and an RSS reader. Beginning next week you'll also be able to send anything you've bookmarked or read into your FriendFeed stream.

This was a really standout product back in 2007, and I worry that it may have lost some of its relevance since then. Where it has real potential is with its recommendation system for blog posts and the fact that it includes so much in one place. I don't know of any other product outside of a Web OS solution that manages to have live user and group chat, a news aggregator start page, full RSS reader, and a feed directory within the same enclosure. The closest thing is Netvibes, but that doesn't offer nearly as many options for re-sharing content without being noisy.