in Social Commerce, Social Software

Why I am at a loss with strings.com

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Another promising start-up that recently caught my attention is strings.com or maybe just strings. Their pitch sounds as follows:

Strings is a social tracking and filtering platform that allows you to share and uncover experiences that are relevant to you. Strings incorporates strong privacy controls, easy filtering, and tracking support that allows your actions on and offline to automatically identify personalized trends worth following.

First of all, the name is way too generic, news and coverage about strings are hard to find. They launched in February and managed to get on stage at Web 2.0 Expo, but that’s all I know. Who is the founder? The site gives me no idea. They don’t have a pressroom either.
The sign-up process is old-school – you have to create just another account, no Open ID, Google, Facebook, Twitter or whatsoever. This is lame, but there might be a reason for this. After the sign-up, strings allows you to create „trackers“ for the usual suspects like YouTube, flickr, Foursquare, Twitter, last.fm, but also for purchases at Apple, eBay and the like. For some trackers, you have to provide your login data, which is lame too, but again there might a reason for this.
Why I am completely at a loss with strings is the social part – that’s missing. I’ve no idea how many people use strings, but it’s clear that I can’t find my peeps. There is no way to import my friends from other services like Twitter or Facebook. Without friends, the whole thing is pointless.
And the design isn’t very pretty anyway.
[Hat tip to Denkzelle]