Market My Novel

I saw a Tweet from @RobertMale about Streamy, a social network that had gotten past my radar. With a little research, I discovered that it launched around 2007, but didn’t offer much to savvy social networkers. In fact, ReadWriteWeb said it had to differentiate itself from the vast competition to stay alive in the highly-competitve social media market.

Two years later, ReadWriteWeb‘s staff has a new opinion of the service, which will likely take the place of FriendFeed now that Facebook has gobbled it up.

Of course, being the social media nut that I am, I immediately had to check it out.

When I visited the site, the video of the services blew me away. Leena Rao of TechCrunch describes the service best as a ‘personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed.’ Not only that, but you can create widgets for specific story searches. It’s like having Google news search in the same spot as Facebook, Friend Feed, Twitter, Digg and more. You can also IM and easily share stories with others in your Streamy network. (See also Robin Wauters review of Streamy.)

I’ve just started playing with this service, and I can see some similarities to sites like Ping, but I like the interface of Streamy much better. However, I did have a hard time loading my ten tons of Google Reader feeds, plus Twitter has once again pooped out, so I cannot get my feeds to load.  I’m gearing up to load my Instant Message clients, as well as FriendFeed, which is proving to be much more stable than Twitter in recent weeks.

Streamy also encountered errors when I tried to do things, so their servers must be busy, or it is a glitch that needs to be fixed.

Advantages I see as a newbie to Streamy: I need something that integrates everything but my blogs. With Ping, I never got the blog function to work properly, but other authors did. For me, it is easier to just log in to my blog programs and blog. However, I always hate having to go to all of my individual networks. Streamy appears to be a client that I will be able to use to IM, track marketing stories, publishing trends and more. I love that I can do specific search widgets in this program, rather than Google alerts, which clog my Inbox. I also like the social networking aspect. I’m hoping I can grow my network using Streamy.

Disadvantages: It’s another social network. I could use it for a few months or weeks – or days – and decide the heck with it. I don’t need another one!

Check out this video and see if Streamy can help organize your online time:

Streamy Welcome from Streamy on Vimeo.