I recently got an invite for Streamy by leaving a comment at Mashable.com. (Thanks Mashable, even though I don’t agree with your practice of automatically adding every commenter to your site-wide social network!).

Basically, Streamy is a feedreader combined with a very sophisticated social network. Not so basically, Streamy is a very, very slick way to consume your daily news. Full to the brim with Ajax, Streamy incorporates in its webbased service what normal desktop apps are usually known for: drag and drop and a whole lot of eye-candy. The fact that the site isn’t slowed down to a crawl by their heavy use of Ajax shows how well it’s been implemented.

I could now of course show you a few screenshots, as other sites have done already, but that wouldn’t really do the service justice. You’ll have to trie it yourself to see how slick the interface really is (I’ve got one invite left, leave the wittiest of comments, and you’ll get it!).

Rumour has it on the Internets that due to it’s social news aspect, Streamy is set out to kill popular Digg. Now, first off, I’ve never been a real Digg fan. I admire Kevin Rose for putting together something this big from something so little (which would be a network infrastructure and some viral marketing), but the appeal of submitting stories has never been that big for me (and of course the fact, that 90% of its members are technocentric early-adopters, giving the “democratic” news a certain, well, edge I sometimes find a bit tiring).

Streamy, on the other hand, is not very similar to Digg. It’s more of a feedreader with very social tendencies, letting you share your stories with your friends or groups you are a member of. There is no real voting for stories, and even though you can add comments to stories, I don’t think any service can replicate the effect of the savage commentary of Digg-diehards.

Unfortunately, I can’t see myself leaving a feedreader like Google’s Reader for Streamy. Why? Well, Google lets me share and save stories too. And while the interface may not be as slick, simply because it’s a more devoted reader than a network, browsing stories is a lot quicker and more intuitive.

I can see Streamy succeeding as the service that it is, but only if they manage to get ahold of the people who have not yet found their feedreader of choice. Because even with the added social aspects and the really beautifully implemented interface, Streamy just can’t compete against the big players in the field.

It’s usually not such a great thing when a website you use daily goes offline. Well, this time it’s perfect. Because, you see, it’s just semantics.

Google Reader, as of today, lets you browse your feeds’ last 200 items when offline. While it’s difficult nowadays to find a place that’s NOT online, sometimes you just can’t help it. Like on the tram. Or on a plane. Or in a prison cell, where, technically, you wouldn’t even be allowed to own a notebook. But for a few cartons of cigarettes, nothing’s a problem there. So I hear.

Well, the whole thing is made possibly by an extensions called Google Gears. And while it’s a fascinating thing, I have no clue what the underlying technology is. But fortunately, the good people at TechCrunch do.

It’s not for nothing that I’m always as happy as a pup when I see that Google Reader is ready to serve me a new item from the Netvibes Blog. Because Most of the time, it’s an announcement about their service that just shows they really do work overtime to make it as perfect for people as possible.

Well, today was no different. In their latest blog posting, they announced even more ways of personalization options for their wildly popular starting page. Here’s what’s new:

Themes – While they already have a bunch of themes, it’s always nice to add even more options. Their new themes are quite colourful and add new looks to tabs. All have rounded corners of course . In addition to that, you can create your own custom theme, utilizing their other new feature:

Wallpapers – While they call this new feature wallpapers, it’s really more than that. You can add images to the top and bottom part of the portal, but you can always just change the colours of these areas, including text colours. As for the images, Netvibes provides a few stock images, but you can also add images from Flickr, MySpace, Twitter or even direct URLs.

As always, these changes are implemented quite elegantly and intuitively, demonstrating once again that while Netvibes may not have the cash of the big contenders (iGoogle or MyYahoo!), they sure do lead the pack when it comes to innovation and implementation. So basically, they do everything the others do, only better.