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.