FAQ

About Strands

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.

How does Strands work?

Strands goes out and pulls together all of your activity from the social networks, services and sites you choose. All you have to do is give us your user name for the services we already support in our directory, or just provide us with any standard RSS feed for any of your personal feeds. Strands will go out and fetch all of those feeds and twine them together into a single activity stream (or what we like to call a "strand").

Want to add something directly to Strands? No problem, we also let you post stuff directly to your Strands account as you come across them. Bookmarks, images, reviews, random thoughts, links to MP3s... you name it.

How is this different from other "social network aggregators" and "lifestreaming" services?

Well, aggregation is just one piece of the puzzle. It's a great start to be able to sit in a single place and watch lots of data flow by from sources and people you care about. But we believe that is only the beginning... and the real value comes from being able to pluck out and highlight the stuff that is, or perhaps should be, particularly relevant to you.

How is Strands related to MyStrands?

They are siblings. Strands is an evolution of the discovery concepts we introduced with our music site 3+ years ago. Over time you will see the two become much more integrated. In the meantime, if you currently have a MyStrands account, you can import your MyStrands posts and recently played information into Strands.com.

What is the Strands Tracker?

The desktop application, lovingly referred to as the Strands Tracker, enables you to passively track what you are doing (and creating) and share it with your friends and followers. Currently the Tracker can capture data about what you are listening to, what’s in your media library, and what playlists you have created in your favorite media players. You can also easily link of to more information about what you are listening to, other stuff we think you may like or share your own thoughts about the track in real-time with your network. Of course, you are always in complete control of what is tracked and shared. We are huge proponents of the notion that your attention and preference data is yours, and should be completely under your control.

The flipside of the Tracker is that it provides desktop notifications of both what you are currently listening to (great for when your media player is buried behind other applications) and what your friends are doing across all of their services and networks.

How can I sign up for Strands?

Strands is currently in private, invitation-only, beta testing so we can get feedback and bug reports from early adopters. We will be opening up the service to everyone in the next month or so based on your feedback. If you consider yourself an early adopter and want to try out Strands, sign up on our waiting list, and we will give you an account as soon as we have the capacity.

When will Strands be available to everyone?

We will open up Strands in the next month or so based on the feedback from our early adopters. If you want to be notified when Strands is available, request an invitation, and we will give you an account as soon as we are ready.

What sites, services and feeds does Strands support?

You can manually enter any RSS feed of your personal activity, or see the list of sites already listed in our service directory.
We are constantly adding new services and networks. Help us prioritize by suggesting a site.

If I join Strands, can I choose who sees my feed?

You have complete control over who sees your activities and which source feeds or posts are public or private.

Can I keep track of friends that don't use Strands?

Not currently. But the real fun comes from the "water cooler" conversations that take place around the content everyone is sharing and discovering. It's not nearly as informative of fun when you are talking to people that aren't really there, now is it?

I found a problem on the web site. Where can I report it?

Just shoot off an email to feedback@strands.com and we will take a look at it right away. Thanks!