A former colleague of mine invited me to hear his company's pitch after they won the Nokia Mobile Rules competition. It was conveniently located in the building where I work, so I thought why not. Boy was I happy I went.

Strands is a company building services on data mining. You know how when you go to Amazon you can get a recommendation that people who bought this book also bought these books, I think iTunes has a similar service. Well, Strands takes it a step further by introducing a desktop application that lets you tag your music, messages, pictures and basically any content, and share these tags of lists with your friends. Expanding the technology into payments, Strands is getting to be serious business. Register now as a beta userand find out how.

According to Oliver Bremer, websites and services using Strands will be able to tailor their messages and offering to people's individual tastes. So, the same website will look completely different for you and for me, if our interests or tastes differ from each other. The heureka moment that I got from that pitch was that, with the internet we have thought that the world is getting smaller since people communicate 24/7 in all those different social networks. This is actually not the case, the world is getting more and more fragmented, because soon even though people read the same newspapers, watch the same shows and use the same online services, their view to the world will always be tailored to their individual needs. 

Now, one can ask is this good or is this bad. Putting Orwell aside for a moment, I think Strands are awesome.
(and why wouldn't it be, in addition to Oliver, Joe McCarthy, another former colleague who I respect greatly works there, too :)