We here at MusicStrands have a commitment: To help you discover music you like.

We started by providing you with recommendations based on how your playlists compare to the aggregate music tastes of the world (or at least as much of it as we can learn about). We moved on to provide you with real-time recommendations based on what you are actually listening to at the moment. Recently we rolled out our next generation MyStrands so you and your friends can know what each other are listening to in real-time!

For most folks, friends are the most important way we learn about new music. We built our new MyStrands client to make sharing your musical interests as fun and convenient as is technologically possible. (Folks can still visit MusicStrands anonymously for a huge amount of music information and recommendations, but we hope you’ll join our community to share your musical interests with others).

So given that our objective is helping you share your tastes in music with everyone, how do we address the privacy issue? In short: we only collect limited data if you join our community (keyed solely to whatever email address you give us), and only for the purposes of making it easy for you to share your musical tastes with other community members and to provide you with tools for finding music that might interest you based on the music information we aggregate. We don’t provide that limited amount of individual data to anyone else. And most of the data that originates from individual interactions loses all personal identifying information as it is reduced into the huge amount of statistical information that is at the heart of our approach to making recommendations.

With all this controversy going on, we realized we need to ask you what you think about the next generation of MyStrands. We have added several new features, including a way for you and your friends to let each other know in real-time what you are listening to, and a smart playlist builder that will help you out in deciding what to put on your iPod. We hope you will give it a try and tell us what you think!

You do have to sign up with us so we have your permission to read what you are listening to so that we can provide some suggestions to you about other music you might like, and so we can make it easy for you to share what music you like, and that you think they might like, with your friends, and indeed all the world if you prefer. (To get the benefit of all of these MyStrands feature, though, you also need to get one or more of your friends do the same and to add them as influences by going to their pages and click on the box “add as an influence”).

Once you start playing a song in iTunes or WMP, you will be sharing your music taste with everyone. Everyone will have access to your profile, to your music calendar, that is, if you would like. All your of friends will be able to see what you are listening to in real-time, and you will be able to see what they are listening to.

And of course, you can still remain anonymous and take advantage of much of what MusicStrands offers on our website.

We believe we have continued to improve a neat tool for discovering new music with your friends. But we want to know now what you think. Give it a try if you’d like and let us know.