I came across Strands, thanks to Turoczy, as he was giving out invites to the beta version of Strands and my experience with it has been wonderful. Since, Strands is in private beta, I did not have many invites to offer my friends. I wanted to share my experience with others, so the best way was an interview with the Strands team. Part I is with Kalong Wong and Part II is with John Rogers from Strands.
As a part of the promotion of the Strands beta release, Strands is distributing limited beta invites. Kindly leave a comment if you need an invite.
This is part 1 of the Strands interview. Interviewed is Kalong Wong, from the user’s perspective.
Me: What is strands? (your point of view)
Kalong: Strands is a website where you can display your life in the form of notes, blogs, images, websites, videos, etc.- most everything you do online. Your content can show your followers what kind of things you like and what type of person you are.
Me: Content aggregation services are available by the dozen, what sets strands apart?
Kalong: Yes I have dropped by different aggregation sites like SocialThing! and Friendfeed but never signed up. One thing I noticed about Strands that is different from those sites is that we focus on content more than social connections. We are more about discovering new things, finding new websites, places to shop, interesting videos, etc. than staying updated with the latest girlfriend dramas.
Me: Tell me more about the other services which the company offers
Kalong: Strands.com also hosts moneyStrands (in beta, similar to Mint.com), StrandsSocialPlayer (music recommendations via certain cell phones), StrandsBusinessSolutions, MyStrands (music recommendation network) and partyStrands. I work very specific with Strands so I’m refraining to go into detail about the other branches I don’t know very much about.
Me: How does Strands stress on the “social” aspect of Web 2.0?
Kalong: Oh dear lord I’m not even sure what Web 2.0 is! 
I only took one Computer Science class my whole life, freshman year of college, and completely failed. The only F on my transcript.
Me: For a user, the most important aspect is convenience.
Kalong: Yes, right now since the site is in beta, many of the functions aren’t quite convenient yet and maybe it even takes quite some effort to share things on Strands.com. This should improve considerably by the time we release it to the public. Adding feeds should be much easier.
Me: What would you like to tell the new strands user?
Kalong: Don’t worry too much about finding your friends on here! Use Strands as a way gather your internet activities into a display for others discover and share. Use Strands to discover other people with the same interests and stay updated with the best content. 
Kalong: I hope this helps! Sorry I couldn’t answer all of them. Let me know if you need any clarification. Good luck!
Part II of the Interview
Interviewed is John Rogers, Social Media Lead at Strands
Me: What is strands? (your point of view)
John: A life-streaming and discovery site designed to bring together the online services you use, share them with friends, and discover what’s hot among the people you care about.
Me: Content aggregation services are available by the dozen, what sets strands apart?
John: We see aggregation as a commodity, anyone can do it. The real question is what value can be added to the data you aggregate. We want to put some intelligence on top of this data by adding personalized recommendations. The key differentiator here is that our goal is to help people discover new things, and we provide them tools to do that (filters, hot posts, and soon recommendations).
Me: Tell me more about the other services which the company offers
John: Some of our services: The MyStrands Social Player is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music, connect with people, and share your tastes with friends. It has recently received Nokia’s Mobile Rules Award http://blog.strands.com/2008/03/19/mobile-rules-winner/
MoneyStrands, which will be launched soon, aims to help people better manage their personal finances (http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/29/moneystrands-expensr/). Business solutions: we help online retailers use our recommendation technology, so they can in turn help their customers discover the content on their site
Me: How does Strands stress on the “social” aspect of Web 2.0?
John: Users can generate content both on Strands and on other services, and distribute it to the people they care about on Strands with the freedom to share and re-use.
Me: Content aggregation services are the incarnations of information overload. comment.
John: We play in a very noise arena What sets us apart from other players, our recommendation engine, will help deliver content a user likes, and at the same time eliminate some of the noise they don’t. The signal-to-noise ratio is key, and something that is always on our mind.
Me: What would you like to tell the new strands user?
John: Invite your friends (everyone in the private beta is given some invites), and tell us what you think! A service like Strands is much more valuable with friends, and we love hearing from our fans. Listening to our early users is a great source of inspiration for us, and it is fairly regular that we will send a cool Strands t-shirt to a fan just to say “thanks”
The following questions directed only at John
Me: What is strands according to you?
John: Strands is a discovery platform, consisting of aggregation, recommendation, and display engines
Me: When is strands likely to be ready for public release?
John: Soon
Me: Can we expect strands to work along with mystrands, money strands or other services in the near future?
John: Ideally everything Strands will exist under one roof – one account, one username, one password. — There is a natural fit between our music discovery service MyStrands and our new life-streaming service, and soon they will be closely integrated. But when it comes to integrating social media with personal finance there are some reservations. Understandably some people aren’t comfortable mixing to two, and we wouldn’t want to do anything to add to this. Ultimately, we will listen to our fans and go from there.
Me: During times of high volume, most services go down. How do you plan to combat this?
John: Strands.com has been engineered from the ground up to scale, our #1 goal was to build a scalable design from the get go. Having this as a design priority and knowing we expect huge #’s of users and items, we have designed for future, and this should help us alleviate some of the issues other services have experienced.
Me: The interface of strands looks great and feels great as well? How did you manage to come up with something like this?
John: Thanks Rohit, glad you like it! We’ve heard lots of great feedback about the interface, and don’t plan on straying far from what we have now. The way I see it, we came to this idea by listening to the experts and designing for the novice. We want to provide all the tools to give a technologist everything they want, but at the same time keep it simple and clean enough for a novice to enjoy the service as well.
Me: How is Strands technology superior to other services?
John: We could tell you but then we would have to kill you No seriously, we have been focusing on developing recommendation technologies for a while… our differentiator is our focus on personalization.
