Personal Data Mining coming at last? Check out Strings

I'm a data geek and love the idea of mining my personal data for patterns. A while back I got excited about where EMC might go with Decho (their acquisition of personal cloud data storage provider Mozy), but after a rebranding push and some teaser-y PR, they've reverted to the Mozy brand and plain vanilla storage offering. And while I like the idea of Blippy, I'm skeptical that default public is the right way to go for most people, at least right now.

The latest contender in the fight is Strings, a new service that launched to day (hat tip to GigaOm for poining me their way). It looks like today's publicity push has taken their site down, but Liz Gannes' writeup is tantalizingly close to the idea I posted about back in 2007:

"A service called Strings, which launched today, is trying to find and collect all the different ways you can track yourself online — your purchases on Amazon, Zappos and other e-commerce sites; your watching on YouTube, Hulu and Netflix; your listening on iTunes; your check-ins on Foursquare. The service is not about socializing and sharing that information, like the Twitter-for-credit-cards Blippy, but about privately harnessing it. It aggregates all that different preference data to build a better picture of things and places you like."

I'll definitely be taking Strings for a spin (assuming they can solve their scaling issues) and will post more thoughts once I've had a chance to dig in.