Streamy: Test Driving the Newest Social Media Dashboard

In: business strategy|social media|user experience|ux

14 Aug 2009

Posterous, Tweetdeck, Seismic FriendFeed and others have all been trying to become the uber-social media dashboard—one place where I can browse and manage all of my social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook and Digg.

Streamy.com (www.streamy.com) has re-invented itself into a strong entry, especially given all the FriendFeed concerns. It promises a GUI that looks as easy to manage and configurable as iGoogle, with a community of friends that you can message through any of the social media networks you belong to, as well as within the Streamy.com network itself. In addition the initial version of Streamy also allows you to import your RSS feeds and mix them with other feeds that Streamy offers.

Everything flows by in a gentle sort of way, and you are offered three different GUI treatments that can offer you anything from a brightly lit interface like Twitter to the dark onyx theater treatment like Tweetdeck.

This morning I went through the initial set up of my Streamy account, and this is where some serious short-comings become clear. While I can integrate with my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I cannot import my friends from either of those—you now have a third network you have to build friends within (or fourth or fifth, if you use LinkedIn, Ning or other closed ID networks.

I tried to “find people” within the network, but the only mechanism for this is to scroll down an infinite, unorganized list of all the people in the Streamy network to see if you recognize a face. This is like walking down a twenty-block long line of people trying to find a friend. Yikes! So it will be awhile before I have much of a dialog going on within Streamy and that’s a shortcoming.

The dashboard is organized into Subscriptions, People and Groups. In theory in the future you’ll be able to find people, make them your friends, and find people to form groups of interest. Searching for friends and groups is, as I’ve said, a matter of scrolling through lists.

A fast scroll of the list of groups is dizzying and hard to organize. You see groups like the Plaza Hotel, Photography, Adam Lambert and Web Development. Where to start? I typed several ideas into the search box: social media finance, cooking—none of them are currently groups, which is the start up problem social networks suffer in the beginning. (By the way, “cooking” is one of the groups shown in the orientation demo, so its absence in actuality is one of the WTF moments I went through in set up.)

So of the three major modes within Streamy—subscriptions, friends and groups—only subscriptions is currently working. It seems like the other two will suffer for awhile until more people sign up and go through the tedious process of building connections.

All that said two shining positive assets of Streamy give it great promise for the future. The first is a solid dashboard architecture for social media feeds, and the second is the ability to quickly manage and tag feeds from your personal list of subscriptions, but also a rich library of feeds Streamy offers.

But the Digg and Delicious features of tagging and sharing remained trapped in the walled garden of current Streamy users. And no I don’t recognize Jeffery Songco, Jason Fuchard, or SomeDude, the first three people Streamy thought I might want to be friends with.

The decks and browsers and widgets that we use in various combinations to manage our social media lives will continue to appear, evolve and recombine. I wonder when the masterstroke—the Model T of social media management—will appear? Henry Ford capitalized on the assembly line, what will power the consolidation of my social media world into a single, integrated view I can really understand?