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!