Our story has been shaken up recently. We’re thankful to have a chance to position ourselves in light of some recent events.
From the sidelines of the activity aggregation game, watching FriendFeed innovate left and right was always a pleasure. Rather than make a play, we focused on blogs, services, and real-time chat and sharing. We do have comparable social networking features though, and that’s been the source of the brief meme that Streamy could be the new FriendFeed. I apologize to those hoping to find FriendFeed here – it’s best to take Streamy with a clean palate, as our happiest users have.
And that’s because we haven’t made a fully focused proposition. While we watch the ways you position us, we are designing some defining products. But let’s slow down for a minute.
Long before we were a FriendFeed alternative, Streamy was being called a Digg killer, mostly because their users were looking for one. We were in a tiny closed beta and had published a video showing off some cool functionality. The suggestions that we’ll take out Digg or replace FriendFeed are exciting, but those aren’t the sorts of objectives we have. Don’t get me wrong; making the users of these services comfortable on Streamy is a priority.
Back then, we denied the comparison. Digg wasn’t a target, the RSS reader was. While that is still relevant, it’s changed a bit. Let me lay some groundwork before we take another look.
Content as a Service
It’s purely sensational to declare that RSS is dead. RSS is an underexploited content syndication transport and has been mischaracterized as merely mapping to an “inbox for the web”. That is what’s limiting us, and that’s what’s on the way out.
The misdirection occurs when RSS is compared to social filters like Twitter. RSS is an invisible transport; Twitter is a conversation. The strength of RSS has yet to blossom in a space between the transport and end-user. TechMeme and Fever have developed content-oriented aggregators, which are both compelling and useful. The balance in innovation here has been in favor of the social, where FriendFeed has done some of its best work. However, It’s going to take both data-driven and social smarts to really move beyond the inbox analogy. Digesting millions of disparate data sources and leveraging an additional layer of intelligence is essential to creating the next generation of social news applications.
“It’s not just about the number of places where data comes [from]; it’s about connecting it together. When you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn’t happen just with the Web, with documents.”
Tim Berners-Lee, TED Conference 2009
Intelligence and the Space Between
This is where intelligence belongs. Filtering, measuring, sorting, connecting and promoting. Intelligence here is both data-driven and social. It doesn’t benefit from the same innovation as the high-level web due to technical requirements. There are major opportunities to innovate though, as more data moves faster and storage becomes cheaper and more scalable. Deeper processing and more dimensions, including social graph information, will make for some brilliant new applications on the intelligent web. This isn’t just to say that a machine will simply show us what we want to see, of course – social media plays a part in both decision-making and presentation.
Social Media as Context
Social media serves to measure and provide context to information as it’s passed between users, explaining not only why they’re being shown a story, but also who is talking about it and what they’re saying. It provides a friendly presentation of what’s being said, with relevant social streams and commentary.
Despite its appeal, the raw social web is dizzying. Twitter is a linear torrent of rapid-fire conversations among millions of people. It suffices to say that there are more efficient ways than straight search to engage in the right conversations. Even when conversations are clustered on a story, it is overwhelming. How do you track and interact with the people you really care about?
I previously wrote about what it means to have friends on the web these days, and I think by now that it’s nothing new. In the post I mentioned that we’d like to serve an under-served network: your core friends. It is the handful of people you interact with regularly and meaningfully.
Core Friends as the Network
This is where friends, family and colleagues belong. Innovation around core networks stopped with instant messaging and T-Mobile’s Fave 5. It’s not as sexy as ambiently absorbing the mass minutiae of the most interesting people in the world. I think that will become tiring, though, and a personal, meaningful home will be waiting for us. It means being smart about prioritization. It means directly sharing, watching, and talking. It means creating an environment where, at the topmost level, you are where you want to be, and friends are right there with you.
Streamy as a Home
It’s a place to start. Watch what’s happening and dive into the stream. Find and enjoy conversations that you care about. Intelligent story selection, social media and core networks. It’s a home with your interests, your friends, and the bounciness of a puppy that’s been waiting to see you all day.
Streamy combines various features of other services – that’s what it means to be a consolidated platform. The interesting future of such a platform is in the space between, where it digests millions of streams and seamlessly merges content, community, and context.
We, like this whole segment of the web, just faced a mild identity crisis. We’ve got ours figured out, and have a hunch as to where to the rest will settle. Right now it’s an advantage to be small, quick and unfettered by cumbersome bureaucracy.
Gearing Up and Rolling Out
We are three dudes in an office in Manhattan Beach, California. In other words, you’ll find bugs on Streamy. We’ll fix them.
The platform that we have built is real-time from top to bottom, processes endless amounts of data, and stores it in an indefinitely scalable way. We’ve done our homework and are ready to move.
Streamy is on the tail end of a public beta, which will be reworked and redeployed. We are going to take what we’ve learned, focus on some things, hire a few bright people and show you the definitive value proposition.
Many of you have offered to help in different ways. Thank you. Join us and we’ll deliver. Let’s get our hands dirty and shake things up.
Follow us on Twitter (@streamy) for the latest.
Don
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