Crenk

Just recently I’ve been able to play with the new relaunch of Strands. The social networking site falls in line with popular sites like FriendFeed and PlaxoPulse, and looks to aggregate your social networking habits all in one place, but extend to even recommending things you might like.

Some will say that the multitude of social network platforms are watering down the market, and while that may be so, there are always small distinctions that separate them from one another. I for one thoroughly enjoy my Strands account specifically because of recommendations. Now even though I am new and still meeting people on there, I enjoy going through profiles and looking through recommendations.

Strands single handedly battles the information overload and filters your “feeds” from different social network sites. You set up your profile the way you want Strands to respond. What I find especially interesting is that Strands does not just support the major players in the game, but also reaches out and taps into lesser known social networks such as Hype Machine and Meneame (Spanish Digg clone). This really creates a sense of inclusiveness as opposed to exclusiveness.

Strands “evangelist” Drew Olanoff on Twitter is a great person to follow on Twitter for day to day happenings with Strands. Sure he incorporates details of his personal life, but he works to build strong relationships with the communities he’s a part of and welcomes feedback on Strands.

If you’re looking for a method of “life streaming” that is functional and easy to use, definitely check out Strands. I don’t see it knocking off the heavy hitters like FriendFeed just yet, but I do see some major success for this social networking site.

Currently the site is still under private beta, but you can sign up at their site to receive an invite, or if you’re really nice to a certain someone on Twitter, perhaps…just maybe an invite might float your way!

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If you’ve used Twitter in the past couple of weeks, you’ve encountered something a bit amiss: you can’t use it. Yes, that’s right…Twitter has been down. More than usual too. The loss of our beloved web application has resulted in the masses at a loss for what they should do now to let their friends and network know what’s going on with their lives. I suppose you could rely on Facebook to update your status, but that seems so limited. You could update your blog, but that’s just so tedious and pointless to have a 140 character status update on a post.

But wait! FriendFeed to the rescue! Yes, FriendFeed is slowly dipping into the market share of Twitter without having to do any work. Why is Twitter easily giving up their users to a new application? In an article on CNET.com, the heads of Twitter put it simply as:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not designed as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system…

So basically since your success from 2007’s South by Southwest, you never thought that you could amass such a following of users? And now, seeing that everyone from the Average Joe to mainstream media is using your service, you’re now thinking strategically and then going back to reinvent the wheel? That’s bad…and has definitely caught the ire of TechCrunch’s own Mike Arrington, Dave Winer, and hundreds of other users.

Twitter is obviously responding to these charges and annoyances, but the more that it results in outages, the greater the impact it’ll have on the number of users abandoning their platform and seeking satisfaction elsewhere, perhaps on Seesmic, Utterz, Pownce, or even FriendFeed.

I’m sure that Twitter will be back up and running, but this is something that most of us can expect to happen with any successful application that hits it big and secures major financing. In addition, there’s discussions in the web realm about Twitter perhaps charging for their fees. Is this legit? Who really knows. There are plenty of blogs and videos about the text-messaging/SMS service ultimately delivering status updates for a small cost, but would I pay right now? Probably not…if it results in me paying just to have it work, then no, but if it’s stable 99.99% of the time and has a high ROI and value, then perhaps.

But until then, let’s just hope that there won’t be something “technically” wrong…make it work FIRST, then let’s talk about what we’re willing to put up with.

Iminta synchronizes with content sharing and discovery sites YouTube, Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Yelp, Webshots, Google Reader, last.fm, Twitter, and more. Previously, Aaron created Epitonic.com, one of the Web’s first editorial mp3 download sites. Epitonic was funded by CNET Networks and later sold to Palm Pictures. Aaron then helped CNET Networks launch their highly successful Download.com Music property.

Iminta competes directly with FriendFeed and SocialThing, so they have very stiff competition. We will be reviewing Iminta in our You’ve Been Crenked section in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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