Strands currently has 150 employees and it sees 2008 as "our year to market". Strands told ReadWriteWeb that it plans to ultimately apply its recommendation technologies to 3 areas:

1. Business solutions - helping people find content in a client site
2. Social media - Strands says it will soon launch services "to help people discover things they might like, based on their online behavior" and "help them make sense of all their dispersed social media activities"
3. Personal finance - helping people consolidate their dispersed financial data, and helping them find new ways to save money and invest.

Strands sees these three areas as having "strong personalization challenges."

moneyStrands + Expensr

The personal finance part is what is being announced today. Currently in private beta testing, moneyStrands is "an online money management solution that allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances." Similar products on the market today include Wesabe, Mint and a kiwi startup with global ambitions called Xero. moneyStrands is employing recommendations technologies, such as enabling users to anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits - e.g. demographics.

Expensr, the app Strands has acquired, is a free online application that combines social networking with financial management. There is no word yet on whether Expensr will be integrated into moneyStrands; and if so how. As of now it will continue to run as a separate service.

Conclusion

As we've noted before, we at ReadWriteWeb are following the trend of recommendations closely - it was one of the 5 major trends we outlined in our toolkit for 2008 and was featured in my Media08 presentation Web Tech Trends for 2008 and Beyond. Strands continues to pique our interest, but let us know in the comments what other recommendation startups we should be looking at too.

The DataPortability project taps into the strong conviction, engendered by the do-it-yourself nature of the web 2.0 movement, that individuals should "have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it". This extends to an inherent belief that that it has not been a lack of effective technology that has held back this new culture of open data sharing, but rather business models that have been over-reliant on laying a proprietary claim to some portion of that data.

Taste sharing is a DataPortability use case

We express our online tastes any time we make a choice between the various alternatives available to us. Some of our choices may be characterized by the number of times we select each option when repeatedly confronted with the same choice - for example the number of songs of each genre we play when we select music. Other choices may be expressed subjectively, such as assigning one to five stars to movies we watch, when we are asked to rate our preferences for the different alternatives. In yet other cases, we may in effect be giving estimates for the number of times we would expect to select each alternative, such as when we are asked if we are likely to buy a product or vote for something. Virtually any online experience we have includes one or more instances in which we make conscious choices reflecting our preferences.

For the more theoretically inclined amongst us, we can view a choice as somewhat analogous to a random experiment and our relative preferences as measures of the different possible outcomes of the experiment. The collection of such experiments that we participate in as a matter of course in our web experiences paints a vivid picture of our taste. For the more pragmatic: each time we make choices, we generate data which empirically describes our preferences. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like any other picture, blog post, video, or other piece of online content that we create; and which the DataPortability project is focused on.

A few ideas for open taste sharing

As a DataPortability use case, open taste sharing embodies and embraces the culture shift that the Web 2.0 movement represents. With regard to data ownership, the DataPortability concept has even more succinct expression: our tastes should be ours to share, or not. This puts the user in control of their online experience, so they can set the boundaries of how much they want to share and with whom. Similarly, there is no need to invent new or proprietary technologies to simply identify, encapsulate, and share taste-related data.

A little thought by websites about how to identify and summarize our relative preferences on their site is enough to do the job - along with OpenID, OAuth, and a little task-specific XML for markup. However clearly this kind of data sharing also raises new privacy concerns, which is part of the work-in-progress for the entire DataPortability project.

Image by MyStrands

Perhaps the most interesting challenge lies in educating businesses to thoroughly and thoughtfully examine their current ideas about user data, so they can better understand and enthusiastically embrace The Web 2.0 Golden Rule: "Do for other web experiences providers as they would do for you - under our control as the owners of our taste data - and the blessings of networks effects for taste data shall be yours."

This is a guest post by Dr. Rick Hangartner, MyStrands Chief Scientist. You can follow Dr. Hangartner on the MyStrands blog.

It also positions MyStrands well as the leading force in recommendations technologies. While big guns like Amazon, Netflix and last.fm (owned by CBS) are all using recommendations, none has it as their primary focus. MyStrands describes itself, broadly, as a company that "develops technologies to better understand people's taste and help them discover things they like and didn't know about already."

In addition to the competition, MyStrands is also a leading force in a conference called the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. MyStrands organized the first such Conference in 2006; and now it is organized under the umbrella of the ACM, last year in the US and this year in Europe.

As we noted in our previous coverage of MyStrands, we'd also love to see this company take a leading position in implementing open data standards. Although it seems to have lost the services of Scott Kveton, current Chair of the OpenID Foundation and formally MyStrands' Director of Open Platforms. Kveton is now at open identity start-up Vidoop, but back in December he was quoted as saying that MyStrands is "looking closely at APML, as well as working on some other 'open formats' for describing user taste data. The gist is, the users own this data and we want to give them as much control over it as possible."

Let's hope that the loss of Kveton hasn't deterred MyStrands from utilizing open standards in its goal to be the leading recommendations company.