Strands Lifestreaming Service with Tools for Noise Reduction and a Focus on Social Discovery

I have recently received an invitation to try out the relatively new lifestreaming aggregator Strands and since lifestreaming is one of the hottest trends these days I wanted to give it a try and share my thoughts here for anyone who may be considering trying another lifestreaming service or looking for strong alternatives to FriendFeed. My personal impression is that Strands is definitely a strong alternative even now when it is in invite-only beta testing stage.

In general Strands offers all the basic functionality that you expect to see in a lifestreaming aggregator - after registering you add your profiles on the supported services and add those that are not supported as standard RSS feeds. For now the number of services is not particularly huge but the selection seems to be perfectly enough, especially with support of arbitrary RSS feeds. All the services can be marked as private right when you add them instead of making your whole feed private as it is on FriendFeed. In this manner you will be able to see some services only for yourself and only share some selected items with your followers manually if you so choose.

Same as with other lifestreaming services, on Strands you can easily search for your existing email contacts already on the service and follow them here as well. There is also a selection of other ways to find people you may be interested in following - like the most followed, the newest members, or posters in various different categories of content so that you could follow people that post most videos or photos if that’s the type of content you want to be exposed to.

There is also a special section to find people you may possibly know (with Strands recommendation engine choosing the people you will probably be interested in following). From the very beginning you will find the lists functionality here (they are called groups on Strands): you are offered to add any user to any particular group right at the moment of following this user. An additional advantage for the future could be sorting people based on the topics they are engaged in in addition to the types of content they post so that I could easily find all the technology-savvy people and follow those I want to hear more from.

There are some obvious similarities with FriendFeed in the way you view what people you follow do online but there are also some things that are different here. For example, you can both like and dislike items where on FriendFeed you can only like pieces of content. But as Jennifer Van Grove mentions, disliking is definitely a sensitive issue since it is done publicly here so people will probably avoid disliking items not to offend other people.

Another difference is that liking an item here won’t push this item to all your followers that may not see this item otherwise because they don’t follow the people you follow. But instead there is a special sharing functionality that will send the item to all your friends here as well. Of course once the service is open to all, chances are we will see some abusers that will start forwarding their own blog posts or videos to everyone to get some extra visibility from Strands so hopefully there will be a way to report multiple abuse cases.

What is particularly good about Strands is the availability of various filters for you to consume only the content you are interested in at this or that given moment. In addition to looking at content posted by friends only belonging to a certain group you added them to or only people that follow you, you can also choose what type of content you want to see - like only blog posts or only bookmarks (both from the selected group of people or even from one user only). This is definitely a big advantage since it allows you to decide what level of noise you want to face.

It is worth noting that Strands lifestreaming service is only one of the products in quite a wide range of social and recommendation products by Strands Inc. and if they continue to integrate their other services into this lifestreaming application, it may be a very different option than what FriendFeed now has to offer. For example, right now Strands allows to broadcast what music you are listening to with their iTunes tracker but probably other services will be integrated eventually in this or that form (the company also offers personal finance and business solutions).

This is exactly where true potential for Strands could be: since the company specializes in developing recommendation solutions for various types of content (with their primary initial specialization in music), Strands could really serve best in discovery of content that could be useful to a user. Actually this is exactly what the company focuses on when describing the new service in FAQ section - and there is no doubt that social discovery of content is gaining in strength and popularity with many people saying that they stopped using feed readers completely and chose FriendFeed as it is perfectly enough to get all the latest news (often faster than what you will get with a usual feed reader) from the people with the most authority in any given field. So it is no doubt good that there is now a service that pays particular attention to this aspect and this can be the aspect that will help Strands stand out of the crowd eventually.

You can read more about Strands in these detailed reviews by Louis Gray, ReadWriteWeb and Ars Technica. If you are interested in joining Strands to see what it has to offer, leave a comment below - I already have a few invites and I’ll try to get more from the team if the interest is here.

UPDATE: use the code “drew” when requesting an invite and you will soon get an invitation link in your inbox.

And of course if you join or are already there, I invite you to follow me as well.