Streamy
Overview
A real-time news feed site with social networking features. Combining its own RSS news feeder with social networking sites aggregation, and a real-time search engine. It connects to few social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed and Digg in particular. It lets you share news with your friends through a neat drag and drop feature, find news based on what your friends are reading, and view all users's streams related to you. There is some customisation such as with the social Networking pages. A recent interface upgrade is much improved and allows sharing through messaging. You can import an OPML for the newsfeed. July 2009.
Streamy
Conclusions
Great Potential
A quick and easy way to read news feeds and share updates with social network sites and friends. However, it has a limited number of social media links.
Related Apps
ZooLoo
Overview
A new home start page similar to Netvibes in ease of use with additional features: website and blog creators and much more. The start page is a private dashboard to add widgets for email, Facebook, Twitter and lots more. Its downside is being new widgets are limited and mostly American. Its ambition is to combine many features we use over a number of sites into one portal: rss feeds, media sharing and social networking. It uses Adobe Air which is simple to use. The widgets can be drag and dropped. It is very similar to Netvibes in operation and design.
The zLife” area encroaches into Google territory with calendaring, an address book and a to-do list. Whilst easy to use it is basicin functionality and unlikely to worry the competition. Its main benefit is integration within the whole suite. Without the ability to import from other sites like Google it is unlikely to poach from them. The “zSocial” area links to friends through features like talk but without mass migration from sites like Facebook it is unlikely to be used. There are even more areas called shopping and entertainment that let you manage wishlists and stream audio and video from sites such as Last.fm and YouTube. The Shopping area is American-slanted.
After creating your own sub-domain you can create a public website in the zCreator area with a profile, graffiti wall (to store clips), blog and photo and video pages. The tools are easy to use although basic compared to mainstream blogging tools. The admin area gives you privacy across many pages, which were confusing to use. August 2009.
ZooLoo
Conclusions
Netvibes with add-ons
It is well laid out keeping the three features distinct. As a new site it needs more features: compared to Netvibes the dashboard lacks many widgets, compared to Google zLife is very basic, zSocial needs users to get traction. Many features are basic and will not suit power users.
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- Netvibes
- Pageflakes