Orangeinks

Streamy: A New Social Media Streaming Site Launches

Streamy is a brand new social networking site with a lot of mix. It mainly functions as a social media aggregator. You can stream various social networks on your Streamy account. This includes Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Digg and Facebook.

You can also use Streamy as a RSS reader, a real-time news reader and real-time search engine. Customization is very easy to perform. You can add columns to your Streamy page in just a click and drag them to optimize the readability based on your screen size. There is also a recommendation engine that hands out blog recommendations based on your Streamy behavior.

Watch the Streamy video.

If you’re a user of the social media networks mentioned above, you’ll definitely find Streamy a worthy tool to manage them. You can even use it as your homepage instead of opening several tabs and logging in to view updates and post comments. It’s a service with a simple design that packs powerful features. A place where several social media tools are all rolled into one. Watch out for more features to be launched in the coming weeks.

Tags: aggregator, news reader, RSS Reader, social media, social network, Streamy

Navigaya: Reinventing Surfing Experience

Navigaya is a browsing service that gives a whole new experience in browsing. The service looks great and sports a futuristic design.The flash platform allows you surf in style and in multiple flash widgets. It’s customizable to a certain extent to fit your taste and cater to your browsing needs.

The search feature allows you to search multiple search engines at a time. The search results are displayed in windows from three of the most popular search engines out there namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. A fourth window for Wikipedia search results is also included. If you are not satisfied with the search result you got from the first three search engines, you can always go to the next set of search results from other search engines by clicking the next button or have your search power customized to display results from search engine(s) of your choice. If you found the result that you want, you can immediately start browsing from the window where you found your result. Just hit the full screen mode for a more focused browsing/reading and revert it back to its normal mode in case you want to browse other pages.

In addition to the great look of Navigaya, it also lets you listen to music (with video playing on the background) while browsing. It may not be for everyone for it may cause some distractions to others. You can however turn the playing music video in the background off easily if you don’t want it to interfere with your browsing or you can customize the playlist to fit your music taste or run a tutorial from YouTube while browsing.

The browsing capailities of Navigaya is far from perfect. When I tried to browse different URL’s (including my blog), It failed to load some widgets and CSS. I don’t know if this is the effect of going through their servers or that the pages just loaded a lot slower resulting in time outs in the loading process. Issues like these needs to be resolved in the beta process.

Navigaya also lets you choose from categories and displays related websites for you to choose from depending on your taste. The websites that appear in each category is however not customizable. You cannot add or remove sites from the Navigaya categories. It would be great though if they can add this feature or if not, just add a personal customizable category.

Navigaya works great with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. I tested it in Opera and it seems to work fine. Just choose the Internet Explorer and Firefox browser if you will be using Navigaya in Opera. It’s a must try if you are looking for a different browsing experience.

Edit: The cageories are changable/editable. You need to register in order to edit categories. Thanks to Amit of Navigaya for clearing it up.

Tags: aggregator, browsing, flash site, search-engine, surfing

SamFind: Customizable Search Engine

Search engine aggregators and popping out everywhere. There are Eco Friendly search engines, search engines that pay users for just using the service, button based search engines and a lot more. There is this one search engine aggregator called SamFind which lets you customize the look and feel of the search engine and even the search results.

By default, Samfind aggregates search results from the three most popular search engines out there. This includes Yahoo, Google and MSN respectively. You normally have to type an extra keyword in order to get a search result for a particular topic or niche. With SamFind, you can customize which of the topics you want to appear in the results of your searches. If you want immediate results for pets and animals simply add it to your list of topics and a buttons from niche search engines will appear in your customized search page. You can also place widgets in your custom search page.

I just noticed a few things when I tested the service. The search results do not appear on the same page for some topics. A popup window will open which will bring you to the service offering the niche search service. Google search results do appear on the SamFind page but still pops out another window. There are also no ads in the service. They said that they are kind of anti-ads and don’t want their users to use a service full of ads.

The search engine looks nice and clean but the fonts and design could use a little more polishing. Their concept of displaying art in their pages instead of advertisements is a fresh idea when it comes to search engines. If you are already accustomed to using iGoogle as your home search page and still want to use Samfind, you can easily insert it in your iGoogle page and still benefit from the customized search results.

Tags: aggregator, customize, samfind, search-engine