Facebook – The Streema Blog

Streema and Facebook: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Streema Team

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

Happy Holidays for all of Us

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Streema Team

It’s the end of the year, a time for reflection, wishes and projections. But before we get into that, we would like to talk about “us” as a whole: people who listen to radio, people who express their ideas, people who develop features, people who report bugs, people who fix them… there are many of us and today we want to talk about us all.

YOU are the most important part of all this. Every day on Streema, you listen to thousands of stations, write comments on the station’s profile walls, send us loads of suggestions via the contact form and Facebook application, and even tweet about Streema! Without you nothing would make sense.

WE have been developing this project since 2007 and we’re pretty happy to say it’s been a great journey. Streema has been a big part of our lives with lots of successes and failures. We’re still a small team (that’s why more than once we ask you to be patient with us) but the four of us are as committed as ever to make Streema a success.

Streema Team, from left to right: Juan, Martín, JC and Ricky.

WE are Streema and YOU are Streema. So, to all of the Streema fans out there: THANK YOU for being part of our journey. We wish you a great holiday season!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: We’ve got a little surprise for you in the works, but you’ll need to wait till early 2011 to find out. 😉

Profile Box and Application for Pages on Facebook: We Don’t Always Have Good News

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Streema Team

Last month, we were informed by Facebook that the profile boxes were going to be removed, and that the width for the application´s tab was going to be reduced. We knew this was going to happen sooner or later, although we didn’t post before since Facebook has changed the final dates a few times… and, we should admit it too, we also were “refusing” to accept it.

How does this affect Streema? Unfortunately, it’s pretty bad for our Application for Facebook Pages, since it used the Profile Box specifically on Facebook Pages. That means that it essentially doesn’t work any more. Additionally, the application’s tab changed its width, so we’ll need to adapt it in order to make it display properly (we’ll post news in the next weeks about it).

So, this is obviously not good, we’re not really happy about it, and Facebook users in general aren’t either (you can read their opinion here, here and here). At Streema we’re committed to give you the best service we can, although sometimes surrounding circumstances like this one make it a little harder…

Back in late 2006, when Facebook opened its platform to third party developers, we saw a great opportunity and made it happen. We now understand, though, that Facebook’s strategy has evolved and may not benefit many third party developers anymore – so Facebook will need to understand that many third party developers (including Streema) may need to adapt, change, or even forgo the Facebook platform altogether.

Now, in case you’re wondering, we’re not planning to discontinue our application on Facebook, we still think it is a great app and users do as well since it’s still the most popular application for radio on Facebook. But, as we were saying above, we’ll need to evolve too. We’re still thinking about what that exactly means but be rest assured that we’ll keep you posted.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Song Info Aggregator: the DEMO is Finally Online!

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Streema Team

Early last week we posted that we were working on a Song Information Aggregator. Well, we got so excited that we decided to work on it a whole lot more and… we’re proud to announce that our initial DEMO of the feature is now available on both our website and Facebook applications!!

We wanted to give our blog readers a sneak preview of this feature, which is now live, but will not be widely promoted yet. So, when you are listening to a radio station that displays the name of the song on our player’s screen, just click on the name of the song and we’ll take you to the DEMO. To quickly try it out, here are a few stations that have easily accessible* song information:

– Power Hitz: Top 40 – Hip Hop – Rap

– 181.FM Rock 40: Rock – Adult Contemporary

– ETN.fm Progressive Channel ETN2: Electronica – House

In addition, once you’re on the Song Information Aggregator page, you can search for any other “Artist – Song” by using the search box on that page. For a quick example, click on any of the following songs:

– Lady Gaga – Just Dance

– Metro Station – Shake It

– AC/DC – Back In Black

And for those of you that are interested in the tech stuff, the development consisted of integrating YouTube, Twitter, and LyricWiki APIs.

We really think we can improve this much more, so please send us all the comments you may have about it. Bear in mind this is only a DEMO, so you might find some (or many) things that don’t work as expected. Hope you enjoy it, and as we’ve said, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

* Not all the radio stations in our directory may have this feature working – for more information, please, check our FAQ #4 .

Our Facebook application now has… 5,000 Fans!

Posted on November 3, 2009June 14, 2017 by Streema Team

Hello Streema Fans!

We wanted to let you know that yesterday morning we reached 5,000 “Fans” on our Facebook application! Yes, FIVE THOUSAND. 🙂 Looking back we also realized that approximately a year ago, we posted that we reached 500 fans. That’s a 10-fold increase! This deserves a high five!!! (no pun intended)

Now that we’ve given ourselves a nice pat on the back, it’s time to get back to work and add another “0” to the number. So, this is our challenge: 50,000 Fans by November 2010. That might not be easy, maybe almost impossible – but hey, what’s life without trying for the “almost impossible” things. At the end of the day it depends of all of us!

Once again, thanks for being part of Streema.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Facebook Application was down, but recently relaunched better than ever!

Posted on October 31, 2009 by Streema Team

Hi everybody,

For those of you that tune in via our Facebook application, a few weeks ago you likely experienced severe loading problems. The problem appeared to be on Facebook platform side, and unfortunately, we have to say that we didn’t receive all the assistance we needed to solve it as soon as possible.

But the good news is that we’ve took the opportunity to make huge changes in how our application interacts with the platform – in other words, all the stuff that you can’t necessarily see but that keep the application running! These changes now make our application less susceptible to these platform issues, but one downside of this is that in order to upload this new version as soon as possible, we had to temporarily disable our “Recommendations” section and a few small features. But be patient, we’ll be back with it as soon as possible. 🙂

With this new upload, we also took the opportunity to include other things we were working on previously, such as the new pop up player we announced a couple of months ago. This popup was designed using the style of our Streema.com website, which means that it hides the Windows Media or the Real Audio players, but keeps the play/stop and volume buttons. Bear in mind, though, that you’ll still need to have these two media players installed on your computer! See our FAQs for alternative media players.

As you might imagine, this launch was not prepared with all the care that we would’ve like, but at least our application is now up and running again! If you find any bugs, please feel free to report them.

Anyway, thank you again for your patience and understanding.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Finally! A better radio player on Streema

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Streema Team

So, we just rolled out a new version of our player this week and wanted to make a quick announcement about it!

Before we let you in on the details, we wanted to say that rather than “seeing” the change, you’ll actually experience the difference.

Essentially, when tuning in to a radio on Streema…

No matter which Operating System you have: Windows, OS X, Ubuntu (or any Linux related)…
No matter which Browser you are using: Internet Explorer 7.0/8.0, Firefox 2 or above, Safari, Chrome, Opera…
And no matter which players and plug-ins you’ve installed: Windows Media Player, Real Audio, Flash, etc…

… our new player will find the best player / plug-in combination for your computer. And our new algorithm is much better than our previous one!

What does this mean for you? Simply put, you’ll be able to tune in to a greater number of stations than before. That makes us very happy. 🙂

Anyway, hope you continue enjoying your favorite radio stations, and more than ever, your feedback with this new player will be welcomed. Please, if you find anything not working properly, let us know!

For those Facebook users out there, this new player will be rolled out on our Facebook application (Streema Radio Tuner) over the next few weeks.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Sneak Preview: a New Player for our Facebook Application

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Streema Team

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, check out what’s cooking below!

Yes, we’ll soon be changing the design of our Facebook application’s popup player. If you are also one of our website users, you’ll notice that the new player has the same style as the one on the Streema website.

Anyway, just wanted to give you a sneak preview. More new cool stuff is coming soon to our Facebook application, so stay tuned!

The Streema Team

“Before and After” in Streema’s History: Song Information

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Streema Team

We’re really – and we mean REALLY – excited to announce something that will be the beginning of a “before and after” moment in Streema’s history: from now on, you will be able to see the name of the song that is currently playing. This has been heavily requested by our community – and to be honest, to be able to finally show it to all of you it is unbelievably awesome!

So, how does this work? It’s pretty simple to explain: many radios stations offer this information in all sorts of different ways, sometimes via the stream, sometimes via their website. What we do is figure out how to grab that information (which is many times not easily available) and then we’ll display it both on Streema.com‘s player (check the screen shot above) and on our Facebook application‘s popup player. Here’s a quick sample of radio stations for which we will show the song information:

– Power Hitz, Hits from the U.S.
– NME Radio has THE best Alternative Rock in the U.K.
– Slow.fm plays Slow and Ambient music
– Roots Rock Reggae with classic reggae in Jamaica
– Deepinside – DJ Sessions if you want go Electronic 😉

In addition to most of 1.FM, 977, Sky.fm, 181.fm, AVRO, and M2 channels – check them out!

By the way, do bear in mind that we currently have this feature only for a reduced number of stations, but believe us that we’re working hard to eventually have this for as many stations as is humanly possible. : ) In the meantime, you might want to see our directory ordered by availability of song information!

Is that all? No Sir! On our Facebook application, you’ll be able to update your Facebook status with the song information. Also, keep an eye out because we might have something similar on our website Streema.com in the not-so-distant future.

Where else are we going with this? We’re not sure yet, but we’d love to hear directly from you about this. We hope you enjoy it as much as we are!

And more than ever… stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Ads on our Facebook Application

Posted on March 5, 2009June 14, 2017 by Streema Team

We wanted to let you know, in case you still haven’t seen them, that we added ads to our Facebook application just a few days ago.

In particular, we’ve added two type of ads: one on the canvas of the application (check the screen shot above) and a small one on the popup player. The ads that appear might not be most interesting for now, but we are trying different ad networks in order to show the most meaningful and interesting ones. We also hope that you find some of them entertaining. 🙂

As always, we want to know what you think about this, so don’t hesitate to send us your feedback.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team