Strands - The Other, Other Life Streaming Service

A little while back I heard some chatter on FriendFeed about another life streaming service that had just come out and was 'FriendFeed but better'.  Naturally I had to check it out and take a look for myself to see what all the hype was about over Strands.  I created my account, added some services and friended some people.  That night I spent a couple hours checking out peoples feeds and clicking around.  I hadn't looked in again until tonight, almost a month later.

There's a lot of competition in the feed aggregation or life streaming area these days so you really have to be innovative to catch peoples interests.  FriendFeed came a long at just the right time to catch people with a very solid offering before they were committed to something else.  Anyone else coming into this space really need to take the hints from the current leaders and really push the envelope to be able to pull users from services they've now become attached to.

Strands did a very good job of picking up where some of these other services had left off.  Trendwatch, recommendations and a 'hot posts' list are all things that most other services are missing.  They also had friend groups before FriendFeed added their lists feature.  All these features sounded great to me I jumped ship to check it out.

I said earlier that will the competition out there newer life streaming companies need to push he envelope, which Strands has done, but they also need to take the lead from the services that already exist.  This is where Strands dropped the ball.  One of the things everyone raves about with FriendFeed is how simple and streamlined the interface is.  There's no clutter, just your content.  This is where I feel Strands misses the target.

Everything in Strands is so bulky.  The graphics are bulky, there's lots of empty space, about the only thing that isn't bulky is the content stream, the one thing that should be.  On my homepage I can see two post, that's it.  What am I looking at other than my content?  Pictures of the people I follow, menus and a whole lot of white space.  A service that is used to view the aggregated data of your friends should really put that content front and center, as much as it can, because at the end of the day that's why I'm there.

All in all Strands did a pretty great job of coming up with some new and interesting features but they need to work on the presentation before it will become useful.  With it's current design it seems like they're trying to give all the features and areas of the site the same amount of play, but all features are not made equal.  They need to think about what people are really coming to the site for and put that in the forefront.