EliHorne

I’ve been in and out of Streamy for the past couple weeks, not being able to devote sufficient time to really explore it. Today I set aside a couple hours and decided to pour through its feature set.

Although I mentioned its positioning to Digg in my last post, it’s nice to get confirmation from none other than Jonathan Gray himself. There are currently only 2 posts there, but for those eager to keep up with Streamy’s developments, be sure to add the official Streamy blog at Wordpress.com to your bookmarks.

Probably my biggest realization from today’s exploration is that Streamy is very much “web2.0.” I don’t mean this in the color scheme/big fonts kind of way, but in the web as an application kind of way. For example, subscriptions can be added to your account from a cloud view where you see the most popular in big letters. Having clicked on “Engadget,” I stared at the page for a couple seconds trying to find the “add/confirm” button. Couldn’t find it. I even tried dragging the name from the right column in the sidebar navigation. Thats when it hit me: A pop-up secondary navigation asking what I wanted to do with the item while it was clicked. Streamy has a multi-layered UI. Drag and drop GUI. Super cool.

While some purists may not like the deliciously developed navigation, I think that the unlimited potential it releases is akin to Apple not giving users a “right-click” button on their mouse (mice?). Once the standard is set and understood, being able to visually handle your data is much more useful and progressive than having to (1) select, then (2) navigate over to secondary controls, finally (3) confirm original intention again. Much like a “gesture,” I simply selected the news source, and then tossed it in the direction of “add.” Worked like a charm.

Streamy isn’t all new-fangled interaction either. I’m a huge fan of keystrokes, to the extent that I have a hard time navigating Gmail without them turned on, and their inclusion in Google Reader made it the clear choice over the multitude of other web based RSS readers. When I saw that Streamy supported keystroke navigation, I was excited and quickly made my way over to the legend for a quick tutorial. If you’ve read the article from Jonathan linked above, you know that they are specifically targeting “boring RSS readers,” those poor un-evolved organisms that (almost) completely lack social interaction. Having recently fallen in love with Google Reader, I consider myself a pretty hard-sell. I ditched a paid copy of the gorgeous Newsfire from David Watanabe for the ease of use of the online reader. My fingers instinctively rest on the “J” and “K” keys so that I can cycle through posts and keep the unread number down. So how does Streamy fix this? They move the all the keys to the left hand side of the keyboard. Dead simple, and TOTALLY brilliant. Nothing against the south paws out there, but I’m right handed. 75% of the time, both hands are on the keyboard, but when I go to move the mouse, I move my right hand. Total respect earned, as if they didn’t have it already.

Like online readers, Streamy has speed going for it by allowing you to get the best content out of a ton of sites while only loading text and inline images. The light boxed info box is even designed in such a way (rounded edges, background image) that it feels like you are reading something off a “private wire” instead of the RSS feed. I only really became aware of it when I noticed FeedBurner’s familiar blue links at the bottom of the post.

So is the service perfect? No, far from it. While it’s hard to believe, this site is only in beta (private at that). There are only a handful of users that have access to it, but it feels more developed than many 1.0 applications I’ve used. There are a couple rough spots when visiting in Safari (the light box will load posts, but internal navigation like “adjust your settings” comes up blank), and sometimes the Javascript gets a little “thick.” The site is very narrow (width-wise), designed to be all inclusive, but I would argue that any users looking for a service like this probably have decently sized monitors. As I was exploring the site, I was tempted to set Streamy as my homepage, replacing digg. The problem is that my browser window is frequently set to 100% my screen width, and thats a lot of negative space for a site like Streamy. I know it would be hard to go fluid width with some of the stuff they have going, but let’s make it a little wider, ok guys?

Also, while it is a scary proposition, Streamy really needs to open the floodgates a bit and let in more testers. I have a strong feeling that most of the really mind blowing features will appear when you have people to share the stories with. As it stands, the only person on my buddy list is Jonathan. Until the social feature kicks in, I’ll still be using boring ol’ Google Reader as my primary RSS app.

So it is on that point that I announce I have 5 Streamy invites to give out. First 5 comments can have them, on the contingency that you (a) tell me what you think about the site, (b) explore the social features of the site with me.