After a name change, a couple of acquisitions and a venture into a major new direction, it's pretty clear that Strands (formerly known as MyStrands) is undergoing some huge changes. Looking back at some large, recent rounds of funding for Strands, it could easily have been conjectured that the company had more than music recommendations with mobile access up its sleeve. Months later, we see that is the case.
Strands is hoping to take its recommendation system, which its been cultivating over the years, and apply it to a number of different verticals. So far, Strands is looking to move into the personal finance recommendations. Now, with the official relaunching of Strands' new site, another aspect of Strands new focus is evident. Social discovery for personal recommendations, broken down into two main areas: placing Strands' Recommender on top of users' life streams, and enabling data portability integration.
I know I often refer back to the example of FriendFeed for recommendations on life streams, but as the FriendFeed is prominent as an aggregator, it's easy to use FriendFeed's example of a life stream that could useful as a recommendation tool, should it have additional search and filter options, as well as automated extrapolation of various data points based on participating user activity. This little dream of mine, which FriendFeed continues to work on, is now being directly achieved with Strands' new feature.
The other new aspect of Strands, which is enabling integration of data portability, is another good move for this recommendation-based service. What Strands is doing is providing very precise use cases for which a user's data portability profile can be used across the web. This is what it's going to take from a number of data portability participants in order to truly bring the emerging standard to full fruition.
With Strands' particular implementation of its new areas of focus, even a few client applications like its supported media players will be tapped for data in order to infer more activity for recommendations. One thing I couldn't help but consider when I learned of Strands' relaunch was the effect such recommendation and data portability tools would have on third parties like Matchmine, which provides recommendations through a few different channels, for individuals and networks.