Follow Gubatron’s tastes on Strands.

Check out his original post!

Tomorrow is an important day, and we all have to vote. Strands is running a quick poll here at Strands asking people to help undecided voters. What is the single most important reason undecided voters should vote for Obama or McCain?

For Obama, tell them here

What is the single most important reason undecided voters should vote for him?

For McCain, reply here

What is the single most important reason undecided voters should vote for him?

And don’t forget to vote!

Operation mainSTREAM is gaining steam and we kicked it off with a contest.

We asked people to invite their non-geek friends to Strands, and the people who invited the most folks during the month of October won some prizes. One for them and one for their non-geek friends.

Today, we know who the winners are, and we’d like to thank them for joining our Operation mainSTREAM efforts and for showing folks how rad Strands is.

It was so close, and you all kicked serious ass.

Special Super Congrats to:

5th place winner (2 Flip Cams) - hardaway

1st place winner (2 Macbook Airs) - KathleenLD

Email me at drew at strands dot com to claim your prize!

We’ll be doing more contests, don’t you worry. Keep spreading the love of technology to non-geeks and please keep spreading the Strands love! Never worry, we love you back even more.

There is still much work to be done. Stay tuned.

Today we’re excited to announce the first version of search on Strands.

Why would you want to search on Strands? Well, maybe you want to find all of the people who listen to Britney Spears. I know I do. Shoosh, it’s my guilty pleasure

You can search on yourself or everyone on Strands, and then filter on the type of stuff you want to find…such as blogs and notes, videos, movies, bookmarks, events, and of course music.

This is very early days for us and search, so please give it a whirl and as always, let us know what you think by emailing us at feedback at strands dot com!

Congrats to the Strands team for kicking serious butt on this one, and congrats to all of you for letting us know how important search is to you.

So a few of you took me up on my offer to do Screencasts on various Strands related stuffz.

So here ya go. This Drewcast is on how to add images to Strands easily.

http://screencast.com/t/2hqaDDjk

There ya have it! Wondering how to do other things? Drop me a note at drew at strands dot com.

We released our taste-streaming service, Strands.com, in late May and have stayed in private beta for one main reason: to listen to you. While we have a clear vision for where we want to see Strands down the road, your suggestions, feedback, comments, and questions have been one of the biggest inspirations for us.

We always appreaciate hearing from you, and are trying hard to build the service around your requests and feedback. As a way of saying thanks and giving ya’ll some recognition, we have built a page on our community blog dedicated to you!

On the Strands Thank You Wall you’ll find all the regular people (just like you and me) who have given fantastic feedback, asked the hard questions, and even helped us through a problem or two.

From the Strands Team to you, “Thanks!!!”

So we just put out a bunch of new features and fixes.   It’s a mini release that packs some big punches.

How did we know what to work on and fix up? You of course. The past few weeks have been hella rad, because your feedback, your interest, and your suggestions are what is driving us to make Strands really kick ass.

So first we’d like to thank our team for really digging in and taking care of business. Then we’d like thank you, our Strands community for going above and beyond. Take a bow, you deserve it.

Now onto the awesomesauceness.:

* added “invite friends”/import address book to registration flow (and improved from the “people” tab too) - This means that you can now easily invite and add people from your Gmail/Yahoo/MSN email accounts. It’s so easy, my mom can do it. If she had any contacts.

* gave everyone unlimited invites - Yep. To go with Operation mainSTREAM’s contest (You have until Nov 1st to get in on the action!), we’re giving away prizes to the top inviters for the month of October. You can win a Macbook Air for you and your nongeek friend. You’ve been asking us for more invites and well…you got em. Unlimited Power up!!@#!@#!@#

* when someone registers from an invitation, they automatically follow their inviter - Invite your dad, and they accept? They’ll auto follow you. W00t!

* members can now explicitly “block” other users from following them - Someone pissing you off? Block that fool.

* members can delete their own accounts - Don’t want to stay around? (sadtrombone) you can delete yourself if ya want. But come back now ya hear?

* numerous bug fixes - Wonky stuff we caught and you caught, and now they’re fixed. Keep the feedback coming to feedback @ strands.com

WHEW. There you have it.

We love you guys, keep on truckin’ with us!

_drew

Louis Gray and Drew Olanoff

This is the beauty of community and having supporting networks of people who step up and reach out to you.   Louis Gray helped connect me with a member of ours…Mona, and offered her these suggestions on how to follow people on Strands.   So here it is for all!

When Corvallis-based Strands released their new lifestreaming service a few months back, I found it friendlier than FriendFeed, but not without its share of faults. To its credit, the Strands team was open to criticism—taking its detractors head-on—and, as such, they continued to elicit tons of valuable feedback on ways to improve the service.

We loved Rick’s post, he is totally heads on. There is no way you can build a service without the feedback from the community. And that’s what we are doing.

Louis’ comments are in line with Rick’s. Last month, I … said [Strands] was high on potential, but needed to make a number of changes, to better highlight its users’ shared content, and encourage community, to bring it more in line with more established players, like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed. Today, the site rolled out a number of enhancements aimed to help bridge that gap. Yes!

The news is that this week we released the new UI with lots of improvements, all suggested by you guys, through emails, tweets, directly on Strands or on Friendfeed. Does not matter what the medium was, it has been great feedback so far… please keep it coming!

What’s new:
* more prominent “strand” (center column) - fluid width
* cleaner UI
* larger avatar images (reupload your avatar image to get better quality at large size)
* less lightboxes
* new “share something” box
* more prominent play icons
* and much much more

As today David Chartier wrote a nice review of Strands on Ars Technica .

This is just the beginning, thanks everybody!