We are happy to announce our latest launch here at Strands. We are opening the private beta for Strands.com, a very early version of a destination site that aims at helping people discover new stuff. Our vision for Strands.com includes two innovations towards which we have been working on for quite some time:

1.- Applying our social recommendation technologies on top of the lifestreams of users and their communities, to provide them with personalized recommendations of media content they might like, based on their behavior.

2.- Allowing data portability for taste information, enabling users to take their taste profiles with them to other sites.

When we are online, we generate at least two types of data. Digital assets such as list of friends, pictures, etc, that are normally the focus of the data portability community. And taste-related data, data which describes our preferences, our tastes. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like digital assets, and is the area where Strands is focused.

Without inventing new or proprietary technologies, we will identify and encapsulate taste-related data and enable the users who own it to take it with them. We will leverage into existing efforts including OpenID, OAuth, and APML-style representations for our relative preferences of all types and not just our attention preferences. Users will be able to take their taste profiles with them to other websites that are prepared to be taste profile consumers.

Strands.com will lead the way by aggregating users taste data from the sites and services they choose, and creating a portable taste profile out of it that users control and own.

We expect to roll out these two innovations in the near future, and really look forward to working with all of you to enable open taste sharing across the web. If you’re a website developer and you want to be part of the open taste sharing experience, please let us know.

As a first step towards this goal, we are opening up the Strands.com private today which currently includes:

1.- Filters and Hot Posts - Strands.com helps people cut through the noise of lifestream posts by providing filters, including date, content type, and groups created by the user. For example, you can find what videos your coworkers have favorited this week, or see only what music your partner has listened to today.

Personalized ‘Hot Posts’ highlight what’s popular with your friends, to help you discover new things that your friends have enjoyed.

2.- Granularity and Privacy Options - Strands.com allows you to control what you share with whom. For example, you can post a photo you liked, allowing only your closest friends to see it, while sharing your taste in music with all of your coworkers.

You also have granular control over what you follow from whom. For example, you can follow your friend but filter out his tweets.

3.- Strands Friend Tracker - this desktop application shows you real-time updates on the activities of your friends right on your desktop. It also records your activities – such as listening to songs in iTunes - and posts them to your lifestream.

We will be adding improvements and new features to Strands.com quickly as we move toward our vision of implementing personalized recommendations and open taste sharing.

There is an excellent post by Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW, discussing the economics of data portability.

“We argue that it’s in everyone’s best interest that the data be freed. Vendors have far more to gain by working to add value to freely flowing data than they do from trying to horde as much data as they can”.

We at Strands have already explained our vision of why we think not only users but also vendors will benefit from data portability, and why it is important for web personalization.

When we are online, we generate at least two types of data. Digital assets such as list of friends, pictures, etc, that are normally the focus of the data portability community. And taste-related data, data which describes our preferences, our tastes. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like digital assets, and is the area where Strands is focused.

Today we are happy to announce the acquisition of NetworthIQ, a social personal finance Web site that lets people track, share, and compare their net worth. This news follows the acquisition of money management solution Expensr and the private beta launch of moneyStrands, Strands’ personal finance application.

NetworthIQ was founded by Ryan Williams and his partners in 2005 to enable anyone to easily track their financial progress from a high level, and anonymously share it with the world if they choose, in order to benefit from community’s financial insights and experiences.

NetworthIQ has been a pioneer in the personal finance space, allowing users to unlock the value of the community as a resource for information, inspiration, and advice. More than 15,000 users have already chosen to post, and in many instances share, their net worth with the community. Part of Strands’ vision is to use social recommendation to help people discover new content, services and products based on their tastes, and this acquisition will help us to do that in the personal finance space with moneyStrands.

Currently in private beta testing, moneyStrands is Strands’ social money management solution, which allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances. With moneyStrands, users can anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits, such as demographics.

Strands is pleased to sponsor the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project, an opportunity for students to receive funding for open source development focused on the web based programming language “haXe “. More details are available on the labs announcement page . This project is supported by Strands, as well as members of the haXe community.

The project is led by Justin Donaldson and Franco Ponticelli. Justin is a PhD candidate at Indiana University in the School of Informatics. He focuses on Music Recommendation and Human Computer Interaction, and has been a research intern at Strands for the past few years. Franco Ponticelli is the author of the book “Professional haXe and Neko” and an active member of the haXe community. He is a free-lance programmer with a passion for Web Applications and in his free time he is currently developing haXe/PHP, a method of targeting PHP using the haXe language.

Why haXe?

The World Wide Web has evolved into a complex assortment of platforms and languages. These languages often are considered as implementing different “layers” of an interactive web experience: From the client side layer languages of javascript and actionscript, to the server side layer languages of php. The variety of languages and protocols has made it difficult to create “cohesive” web applications that share information seamlessly across all of the layers. As a developer of rich internet applications, Strands is interested in streamlining the development of its growing number of products and services. HaXe presents a very promising approach towards unifying web development in an efficient and open manner.

HaXe has grown at a steady pace since 2005 when it was first released. Since then, 20 official releases have been made (latest is 1.19) each bringing new features, fixes, and new possibilities. The developer community has an active mailing list (http://lists.motion-twin.com/mailman/listinfo/haxe ) and also uses the #haxe IRC channel. HaXe has an integrated repository of community sponsored packages called “haxelib” (http://lib.haxe.org/ ), which contains dozens of useful projects and extensions (DBI’s, GUI toolkits, etc.).

Why participate?

By participating in the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project, students will have the opportunity to discover a powerful development environment and to increase their experience working on projects that serve the greater community of open-source developers. With the continued support and interest of Strands and the haXe community, we are helping to make haXe an enterprise-ready, game-changing language for advanced interactive web development.

If you’re interested in learning more about haXe, you can find more information on its web page.

Or… if you’re a student and are interested in participating in our project, please check out the labs announcement page . Accepted student participants will be announced in the coming weeks.

Thanks,
Justin and Franco

Thanks to all of you for the great feedback on the new version of MyStrands Social Player (our initial post here). Tweets and posts, all are welcome.

The Boy Genius Report , The Symbian Core, Symbian Freak, Symbian in Motion, All About Symbian, Mashable, MoneyMaking expirience, Hinkmond Wong´s Weblog, ZDNet, Nokiaapps.org, Profy, Imserba.com, Enrique Dans, Gizmóvil, Celularis, El Winux