Cormac Moylan

I often enter my email when asked if I want an invite to a beta release of social networks, music sites, etc… A few weeks ago I applied for the Strands.com beta. This evening I received my email invite (first two people to leave a comment each get invites).

In the time that has passed between applying for and receiving my invite I have completely forgotten what Strands is all about.  

Their homepage is a giant empty space of information too. I have being on Strands now for about a hour and I haven’t received any overview information to my personal email or to my Strands inbox. When I logged in for the first time I didn’t receive any introductory piece about what the site was about or how to use it. The below screenshot is the landing page you are redirected to after successfully logging in for the first time. Not too informative either.

I was in a bit of a panic at this stage to figure out what strands was about. It looks visually very nice. It asked me to add my RSS feeds / Twitter / Jaiku / Flickr / Digg / enter / more / 2.0 / apps / here / in order to syndicate my content. I began to assume Strands is similar to popular socialite app FriendFeed. It also provided me with a download which tracks the music I play in iTunes. I then thought that maybe Strands was taking a run at Last.fm by mining my listening habits in order to provide me with music recommendations.

The plot was begining to thicken but I still wasn’t satisfied. I checked out their footer expecting to find some links to explain what his company was about. I clicked on a link for OpenStrands to be greeted by this explanatory text: 

OpenStrands services allow you to programmatically perform many of the same functions available to you through the MyStrands website using a browser. The platform currently includes account, catalog, recommendation, playlist, tagging, and community services. Use of OpenStrands is free to registered MyStrands users.

Oh right. API is it?

In my quest for legible information I re-read the invite email which stated that “Strands lets you centralize your online activity in one place and provides tools that help you easily find the content that’s most interesting to you.” Ah, so it’s like a cross between FriendFeed and Last.fm then? Sounds interesting but the quoted text about doesn’t tell me too much about the product.

In the end the saving grace was a FAQ entry.

Strands helps people discover new things from people they care about. Strands gives users the ability to record their activities and keep track of their friends across multiple social networks and services. Based on your aggregated activities, Strands enables discovery of new things based on your own behaviors as well as those of your friends and influencers. 

With Strands, you just tell us all of the services and networks you use, and we do the rest. We create a single aggregated “activity stream” that others can track… your favorite videos on YouTube?, your recently played songs from Last.fm, your latest bookmarks from Delicious, stories and articles you have “dugg”, your photos from Flickr, your status updates from Facebook and Twitter. We pull it all together so others can have a single view into what you are into, up to and down with. And vice versa. 

Then comes the magic… we take all this information – from both you and your friends – and we pluck out the pearls that we think you’ll really be interested in discovering. What’s hot across the communities of people you care about – regardless of what services they use. And what you think your friends and followers should check out – regardless of where it came from. 

Stop searching. Start discovering. 

That bit in bold there in the end is kind of ironic

Strands, if you’re going to go to the bother of running a beta invite program then please make sure that your potential users know at the earliest stage possible what your website is about. I didn’t want to go on a magical mystery tour trying to figure out the ins-and-outs of your site myself but you didn’t provide me with any upfront and easily accessible information about how to use the site and what the site is about. You could have at least provided me with a default ‘Tom’ who’s profile I could take a look at! 

Anyway. Anyone for an invite? (I only have two).

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting! Cormac