Invites for Strands.com, makes Friendfeed looks dumb

Written on 9th October 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

One of the nice things of sending out a weekly newsletter, are the replies of our readers. Man, a lot of them are doing interesting things. Like Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria, Strands.com VP of communications. His company has been around during four years focusing on developing recommendation technologies to help people discover new things. Over the years they’ve raised $55 million in funding. Now they’ve used their technologies and money to develop a lifestreaming service, one that, Ars Technica says, has “big advantage” compared to Friendfeed. Interesting, uh?

Strands.com has all the regular lifestream things going on: sign up, fill in the RSS feeds forms, and see the content popping up along the way. But the main advantage I was refer to earlier, is that you can filter somebody’s or your own content on its type. So if you have this great friend X, who makes the best songs, but sucks at writing. You can only check his songs (and trying not to hear the lyrics). Why didn’t Friendfeed come up with that? It’s just too logical.

There’s also a tab within Strands.com showing some recommendations and hot content from across the network. That’s were Strands is using its recommendation muscles and where we, users, can discover new stuff.

At least, that is when you’re one of the first hundred to grab an invite with our promotion code thenextweb. Go to Strands.com, click “request an invitation to join Strands” and use the promo code. You will then get an email with the invitation code.