Streamified Blog

We’re so excited that the new Streamified browser extension is finally live! Here’s our quick and easy guide to getting started…

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The basics.

1. Download the Streamified browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox (IE support coming ASAP) here. If you have SGPlus already installed, please uninstall it prior to downloading.
2. Double-click the Streamified button in your toolbar to access the extension’s settings. (If you don’t see it in Firefox, right-click the toolbar area and select “customize,” then manually drag the icon into the toolbar.) Here’s where you can add new streams and edit your settings.
3. Click on “Add New Stream ” to reveal the list of streams you can add. Click on the streams you want to add. Follow the instructions in the pop-up window to log in, and wait for the window to close itself.
4. You should see a black notification appear in the upper right corner of your browser to confirm that the stream was added successfully, as well as the stream’s icon and account name under “Streamified Settings” on the left.
5. To customize streams, click on each one individually (e.g., I would click on the Twitter icon and @streamified) and select what you would like to view in your stream. If you’re already an iOS mobile user, you’ll be familiar with the options here. For example, you can select to only view a specific Twitter list in your Twitter stream, or enable specific Facebook pages that you’d like to be able to view and post to in the stream-specific settings.

Now that you’re all set up, let’s actually browse your streams!

1. The default is to view “all streams,” and you’ll notice that when you go to the Google homepage that the Home button on the left has now been replaced by a Streamified icon.
2. You’ll see posts from all your added streams here, now, side by side with Google posts.
3. If you hover your mouse over the Streamified icon, you’ll be able to select an individual stream to view. Clicking on the specific stream will display posts from that stream only. You can return to “all streams” by mousing over the Streamified icon and selecting that option.
4. Clicking on the toolbar at the top (it has the search bar, your name, etc.) will bring you back to the top of the view.

What about updating your streams?

1. No matter what view you’re working in (“all streams,” Facebook, Twitter, etc.) you can post and crosspost to update your streams.
2. You can either click in the compose box at the top of the stream (it will say “Share what’s new…” in the box) or click the ” Share” button in the upper right corner to begin your post.
3. To select where your post will go to, click each stream, Facebook page, or Tumblr blog and look for the little green check mark to appear, confirming that it has been selected for cross posting.
4. Type in your message.
5. Google features like locking a post, disabling comments, and sharing to a specific circle or person only are still supported. Of course, if you want the post to solely be viewable to a specific circle or person but still crosspost your content to a separate network like Twitter or Facebook, the post will be viewable on those networks as well.
6. Hit “Share”!

Clicking once on the Streamified icon, when browsing any page, opens a share box.

1. You can edit the title and description of your share (for Twitter, the “description” text is what is shared, along with the URL of the page), and select if you want a thumbnail picture to represent the page.
2. Select the network(s) you want to post to. Please note that right now, due to technical limitations, you can’t post to Google+ from the share box.
3. Hit “Post”; the share box should close, and you should see black notifications appear in the upper right corner to let you know that the post was shared successfully.
4. You can also Like, Tweet, or +1 the page from the share box.

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Now that you’ve had a chance to play around with the new extension, what do you think? We have plenty we still want to incorporate, including being able to subscribe to supported blogs. Of course, we’ll keep you posted about any extension news here, too. If you want to get in touch with us about the extension, hit us up at GetSatisfaction.

Justine Dolorfino is Streamified’s marketing coordinator. She can be reached at Justine@Streamified.com.

There’s a whole bunch of interesting information out there. From blogs to YouTube channels to podcasts, it can be hard to sift through the chaff to find the wheat.

It’s true, we have good discovery tools like StumbleUpon, Reddit, HackerNews and so on. Mobile apps like Zite, Flipboard and Pulse are beginning to present us new information. Still, I am personally bothered by a trend: it is difficult to find something new that is already not big.

Some of my favorite blogs, writers, sites, and artists are not already hugely popular. With most of them, I don’t remember how I first came upon their website. Generally, they were too small for the big content discovery engines.

Thankfully, in cities like San Francisco and LA we are constantly exposed to content creators who deserve more attention. In my opinion, there are not enough people out there trying to spread the word about these sorts of creators.

Let us Present

As we spent time having conversations with bloggers who we’ve featured in Streamified, we began to discover that many of them had fascinating stories. With some of them, we hopped on a quick phone call to learn more about what they were doing and why.

The result is the Let us Present Podcast (iTunes link). Let us Present is a collection of our conversations with innovators who are using online communities to build a brand which we believe deserves more recognition. We’ve been in touch with artists, musicians, bloggers, YouTube anchors, sports writers, novelists, and more. We think (and hope) that you’ll enjoy the stories of these people as much as we enjoyed meeting them.

The podcast is launching this week, and will soon go live in iTunes. We’ll be updating it every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (in conjunction with our new digest email).

If you like what we’re doing or think that you know a good guest for the show, shoot us a tweet @LetUsPresent!

This post was written by Zane Claes, founder and programmer for Streamified. He can be reached at Zane@streamified.com.

searchengineland:

Sometimes, I kind of miss when Google was a search engine.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan)

April 11, 2012

The good old days…

You may already know, especially if you’ve been reading our blog, that what started as a product called “Start Google Plus” is now evolving into something new. What was originally a simple browser extension to transfer photos from Facebook to Google+ quickly grew to a full-fledged service that combined multiple social networks into one simplified stream. This service ultimately became the intellectual predecessor of Streamified, the mobile application that allows you to pull from an expansive and ever-growing list of social networks, news sites, web comics, RSS feeds and many more.

During development of the iOS app, the existing SGPlus browser extension had to take a back seat, and was, unfortunately, neglected. But now that the iOS mobile app has been released, we are doubling our efforts to provide a complete solution for managing all of your social networks.

In order to bring the quality of the SGPlus browser extension up to par with the iOS mobile app, we’ve been hard at work to create a complete reworking of the SGPlus browser extension. This update will also come with a name change, and upon its release you will notice that we are rechristening the extension Streamified, just like its iOS cousin. The browser extension and the mobile application were created with the same intent and goal: to create a seamless social experience that combines all of your streams and postings into a single location. It is our hope that aligning the two products in this way will make that clear.

Of course, there will be a few differences. Mobile applications and web browsers are two separate beasts, and we’re doing our best to design a Streamified experience that suits their strengths. On the mobile platform, of course, this meant creating an entirely new app that shows a collection of “streams” and has buttons to compose, share a link, save a website to read later, etc.

In the browser extension, as before, you’ll still see your other social network streams inserted into your Google+ streams, and you’ll still be able to cross-post from Google+ to other networks. What’s new is that in addition to the networks that SGPlus currently supports (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter), you’ll have access to all the Streamified networks, such as Google Reader, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit and many, many more.

Over time, we plan to improve the ways in which this new Start Google Plus Streamified browser extension update integrates with your browser. What if, for example, you could see your other network streams (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) from within your Facebook feed, as well? What if sharing any page that you are on were as simple as pressing a button and selecting the networks?

The possibilities are endless, and we’re really excited to see what the future holds for Streamified on the browser! If you have any questions, suggestions, complaints or praises, please let us know on our support page.

This post was co-written by Zane Claes, founder and programmer, and Jon Hughes, senior front-end web developer, from Streamified. They can be reached at Zane@streamified.com and Jon@streamified.com, respectively.

We just realized there’s a bug in the release that affects push notifications. Everything else is functional and we’re already submitting a 1.3.1 release to fix the problem. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and we’ll let you know when it’s available!

If you haven’t already seen the news on our social networks, our latest iOS update (1.3, for those of you keeping track) is now live in the iTunes App Store!

This update has a lot of great features, including:

Localization. Using your iOS device in a different language other than English? Our app now supports French, Danish, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese.

Push notifications. One of our most-requested features is now here! Read on to check out how we’ve integrated them into the application. You can add push notifications for any type of stream we support: social network, a save-it-later stream, Google Reader, a supported blog, etc.

For your existing streams, in the “My Streams” view, tap-hold on the stream you want to add the notifications to. You should see “Push: 0 new posts” in the window that pops up. Tap on that and you’ll be prompted: “Use Push Notifications for __?” Select the rate at which you want to be notified, or hit “Cancel” if you change your mind.

For new streams, you’ll be prompted in much the same way after you go through the initial steps to add the stream. Remember, you can always opt out of notifications if you don’t want them for a specific stream.

Of course, we know that sometimes you don’t want to be bombarded with push notifications. In the same “My Streams” view, tap the gear icon for the app’s general settings. Scroll down and you’ll see, at the very bottom, options to silence the push notifications daily. The default is to silence them at 10PM (first line) for 10 hours (second line), but you can customize them however you see fit.

Save-it-later networks. Have you ever been in a situation where you’re checking your streams and come across an interesting link, but don’t have enough time right then to read it in full? We have this problem all the time. That’s why we’re so excited to say that we now support Readability, Instapaper, and Read It Later! These services allow you to save an URL for later, so you can read at your convenience.

One feature we’re especially thrilled about is the fact that in addition to being able to save URLs you find in Streamified, you can also view your saved URLs in a new stream. However, we should let you know right now that if you use the free version of Instapaper, you will not be able to browse your saved articles in Streamified.

Audio and video support in Tumblr. Tired of seeing those “Streamified does not currently support playing this kind of content” in your Tumblr posts? So were we. That’s now fixed in this update.

Integration with Facebook oGraph. We posted about this a few days ago on our blog. Basically, Facebook oGraph turns Streamified into a social reader. Whenever you read a post with our in-app browser (not viewing a post in full-screen, or every post you scroll past in-app!), the title and a link will be shared to Facebook.

This is totally optional for you and you can toggle it on and off in the app’s settings (swipe to the right to reveal the settings, then tap the gear icon).

User interface tweaks, plus speed and stability. All good stuff in our book. The app is now much faster upon first launch, and hopefully you’ll notice a change the first time you fire up the application.

We’re really excited about the new update and hope you love using it as much as we do! Let us know your thoughts and if you have any problems with the update, we’d love to hear from you and help out over at GetSatisfaction.

Justine Dolorfino is Streamified’s marketing coordinator. She can be reached at Justine@Streamified.com.

One of the Streamified team’s favorite features is our in-app support for reading great content. Whether it comes to our iOS device via Google Reader integration, a stream created from a supported blog, or a link shared from a friend on Twitter or Facebook, we love finding cool stuff to read. In fact, you might be able to say we’re a little addicted.

This Friday, we’re launching the Streamified Digest! We know there’s so many great articles and blogs out there, and it can be hard to sift through all of the noise to find things that are interesting. Let us do the heavy lifting to bring you what we think is worth reading, every week.

If you’re interested in signing up, all you have to do is go to http://bit.ly/streamified. We’re not going to use your email address for anything else other than this newsletter, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Justine Dolorfino is Streamified’s marketing coordinator. She can be reached at Justine@Streamified.com.