Streema and Facebook: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

With the latest addition of the Facebook Login Button we’ve added one more chapter to our relationship with the social networking site – a relationship that has been a long and exciting journey. Here is our story.

Ever since Streema’s beginnings, we’ve wanted our site to be a social network for radio listeners. When Facebook launched its Application Platform back in mid-2007 we looked at that as a natural step in that direction, so we started developing an application in late 2007. We did some really cool stuff with that app, even growing to become one of the biggest radio apps out there and winning a “hockey stick award“. As we grew, Facebook Page owners started asking for a way to add stations to their pages, so we went ahead and built an application for Pages.

Unfortunately, Facebook started deprecating certain features for Pages, so we couldn’t continue developing that particular application and we closed it in 2010. Then last year, we realized that we couldn’t dedicate resources to our original Facebook app for listeners and we stopped developing it as well.

Then, the story took an interesting turn, bringing us to today. Our community of users continued growing and Facebook continued evolving their strategy to create a more social web, launching Open Graph in the past year. So we thought this was a great opportunity to bring Facebook back into our life by adding the “Login with Facebook” button – as a result, now you can use your Facebook account to login to Streema while sharing your Streema activity. We think that’s the way to go for now and, although we know there are many things we could do, we believe this is the start of a deeper integration with Facebook.

In a few words, yesterday we had an application (or, rather, two applications) on Facebook; today we have the “Login with Facebook”; and tomorrow, the truth is we don’t exactly know, but we have a few ideas. What’s certain is that we’ll keep working with Facebook and other applications / social networks to create the best social radio experience on the web.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team