Should Strands Apply Recommendations to Personal Finance?

Apr 30, 2008 Author: Kristen Nicole | Filed under: Mashable!

Strands has been around for a couple of years now, and has made quite a name for itself in th realm of social media recommendations. Often considered a competitor to sites like Last.fm, Strands built a brand around providing a service that spanned the web and mobile devices for introducing you to new music, and more recently videos, by way of search and discovery, among other things.

So with a vast amount of funding reaching $55 million, what’s this company doing acquiring Expensr, a money-management tool?

As with many other online money management services emerging in this day and age, Expensr already had a social component to it. Acquired for an undisclosed amount, expensr’s inclusion into the Strands family will help the recommendation service branch out into new directions. To kick things off, Strands is launching moneyStrands (currently in private beta), which directly applies social recommendations to personal finance.

It seems a bit odd at first, but there are already services out there, like Redux, Facebook Beacon and others that have already begun to take such measures into consideration, to varying degrees. If media recommendations, among other types of user and consumption behavior, can be applied to search and discovery, then it can be applied elsewhere–like towards personal finance.

In an anonymous manner, you can share your financial activity in order to compare yourself to others, and learn from the aggregated data that moneyStrands is keeping tabs on. It’s quite similar to some of the social stock-picking sites we’ve seen, as well as other socially adept personal finance management tools, like Geezeo. And it wouldn’t be a Strands product if it didn’t have an optimized mobile offering as well.

With strategic investment from the global financial institution BBVA late last year, the current moneyStrands features have apparently been in the works for some time. As a result of Strands tis with BBVA, Strands will also be ensuring industry best practices. So how do you feel about being able to compare your personal preferences across media as well as spending habits under one virtual roof–Big Brother or a better road to Beacon? To what other areas of our lives will personalized recommendations be applied?

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