Tommaso and I started Stream a little over 2 years ago. It’s been a crazy ride, from our first customer to joining Techstars in NYC. Our first funding round was a whirlwind, but we now have offices in both Boulder, Colorado and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and we couldn't be happier as a team.
Today over 500 companies rely on Stream for their production applications. Our feed technology reaches more than 50 million end users. Leveraging the same technology across so many companies brings many benefits. For one, it allows us to invest heavily in Stream. Currently, we have 11 employees working around the clock on improving the API and that number will continue to grow rapidly in 2017.
This blogpost outlines our roadmap for 2017. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback, so please contact us to share your thoughts.
Performance
We'll continue to push the bar when it comes to performance. At the moment Stream’s average response time is ~40ms. Flat feeds typically load in 20ms and more advanced features such as ranked feeds, aggregated feeds, and personalized feeds take a bit more time and push our average up to 42ms. This is not bad, but we intend to do better and reduce both the average performance and the volatility.
Personalized Feeds
Even more important than the performance of the feed is showing relevant content to the user. Aggregation, ranking, and personalization are tools Stream offers to help you optimize the user experience. The usability of ranked feeds is getting a major overhaul in the coming months. So definitely stay tuned. In 2017 we'll continue to improve our personalization technology. Personalized feeds are extremely powerful, and you can use them to:
- Power content discovery (similar to Instagram)
- Feed ranking (Facebook style)
- Optimize emails (Similar to Quora’s digest)
- Suggest products or content (Like Etsy’s feed)
- Create follow suggestions
Note: You might also enjoy this blogpost: 13 Tips for a Highly Engaging News Feed
Stability
Over the past 6 months, Stream's uptime has been 99.99%. Stability is essential for our customers and we're working hard to further improve this metric.
API Version 1.1
The new year will be accompanied by our first new API version. Version 1.1 will clean up over 20 smaller issues that trip up new users of Stream.
Full Multi-Region Support
At the moment Stream's main DC is in AWS east. We run parts of our infrastructure in other regions, but not the entire stack. In 2017 we aim to release full multi-region support. This will further improve performance for our customers in Europe and Asia.
Analytics & Insights
Stream's analytics currently work well for storing the engagement data for personalization. Unfortunately the reporting and the dashboards aren't in great shape just yet. In 2017 we'll take another pass at improving our reporting and make sure it works well for a larger variety of apps. We'd love to hear from you.
Let us know if you have any tips or feedback about Stream. Simply email support to share your thoughts. All the best in the new year, Everyone at Stream