AdaptiveBlue Makes SmartLinks Feeds Viral

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1. Mario Ruiz
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 1:13 am

   Hi Duncan,

   BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks are amazing. They have a good understanding about semantics for this time. I mean that the project of Semantical Web is a much advance, but nothing to brag today. AdaptiveBlue products are like a preview of this project.

   However AdaptiveBlue has not been able to fully explain the uses of their products. They are not so intuitive. This is a case of a powerful product without good marketing.

   This is a classical case for followers. “The leader gets the arrows and the followers the land.” Other companies taht copy the product but market better could have wider opportunity.

   This reminds me to Unix. Wonderful product not very well position. Of course it belonged to Bell Laboratories. Windows on the other hand, a not so good product wonderful marketing.

   Mario Ruiz
   @http:// http://www.oursheet.com

2. Discount
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 2:15 am

   Wow, Blue Organizer Firefox Add-on is very useful for me!

3. Whats the point
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 5:44 am

   The BlueOrganizer does have some interesting capabilities but leaves me asking “so what?”. I just didnt find these features that useful. Why do I need to organize/link a wine I drank last night in a little sidebar organizer? It seems like you need to go through more steps to look a book up on Amazon than to just paste the book title in the firefox search box and choose Amazon as the engine.

   Interesting concepts, but its one of those “install it, play with it for a day, then forget about it”.

4. Andrew
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 6:06 am

   boring.

5. Alex Iskold
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 7:00 am

   Hi all,

   Please visit http://www.adaptiveblue.com/smartlink_feeds.html to check out live SmartLink Feeds of Top iTunes Albums, Netflix Popular Rentals, NY Times Best Sellers, Stocks from Wallstrip, Wines from Wine.com and more.

   Thanks!

   Alex

6. Alex Iskold
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 7:01 am

   @Mario How should we market this better?

   Alex

7. eli
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 7:31 am

   Alex,
   I think that what Mario is saying is that your site/product is incredibly difficult to understand. I consider myself a relatively smart person, and it took me 10 minutes to really understand your product/business. Come up with a way to describe your product in one sentence that doesn’t use the words “semantic web” in it. No consumer really cares about that or knows what the semantic web is.

   The other thing you should do is get Marshall to start writing your Techcrunch posts for you. He did an excellent job covering AdaptiveBlue in the first couple of posts on the company. He may help explain things.

8. Michael Schreifels
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 9:00 am

   Alex,

   I would have to agree. You have several pages describing the project but none of it really tells you what it actually *does*. How is this actually going to help me? That’s really all the average consumer cares about.

   Also, on a few of the pages I saw you provided diagrams describing how the service works. You even go as far as to represent the Amazon S3 storage system on the diagram. What?! 1.) Most people won’t know what that is, and 2.) The vast majority of people could care less how you store your data.

   This is a really interesting idea, though. There was an article in Business 2.0 within the last few months that talked about new initiatives towards a more semantic web. It was pretty interesting!

9. Alexa Smith
   

   August 23rd, 2007 at 9:29 am

   Alex - cool idea. It would help to have a visual or short animation at the top of the page showing how it works. (i.e. think of the Apple iPhone ads which showed it in action). Good luck!

10. Fraser
    

    August 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 am

    in response to “what’s the point”: I think your question might be explained somewhat with Mario’s response.

    First of all, lot’s of people are looking for ways to organize what they like (whether it be wine, books, music… whatever the passion or interest may be)…. but even today the value of the service can go far beyond that.

    Adaptive Blue has also recently changed their smartlink pane (http://blog.adaptiveblue.com/?p=546) so imagine hearing a song that you like on a blog and then clicking on the smartlink and saving it to del.icio.us, posting it to facebook, AND searching for music that has a similar sound that you may like. That’s pretty cool to me. And it’s additional value that a publisher can offer to her audience.

    In the long-run I suspect that the service will take all of the items that you have organized (deemed of value to you) and then customize the smartlinks for your tastes.

11. Fraser
    

    August 23rd, 2007 at 10:16 am

    @ eli and michael,

    you have to admit that it’s a challenge to articulate clearly just what this service can do for a user (/ why they should care). do you have any advice on how to communicate the value more clearly? it’s somewhat of a fun thought experiment with a service as ambitious as adaptive blue.

12. Jon Hao
    

    August 23rd, 2007 at 10:44 am

    Viral firefox extensions seems to be the latest fashion. Bluemarks and Smartlinks are a good example. Another (good) one is iMacros for Firefox at http://forum.iopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=3201 , which allows you to embed Javascript macros inside of web pages or blogs.

    Well, one thing is sure, that is good for Mozilla Firefox and their great extension system

    Jon

13. jackmayhofferr
    

    August 23rd, 2007 at 10:47 am

    I tried smart links and agree, the premise is very cool. but difficult to implement. The do need some marketing help and a clear monetization scheme. Sure I can use my amazon ID and get referral $, but Amazon links and widgets are easier to make on Amazon’s Site.

14. techmine
    

    August 23rd, 2007 at 4:20 pm

    too much techcrunch coverage for adaptive blue. I agree with most of the folks here - AB products are difficult to understand and implement. People don’t need such a complex product. Bring something simple.

15. Alex Iskold
    

    August 23rd, 2007 at 6:25 pm

    @14 What is complex about SmartLinks or SmartLink Feeds? I doubt you even bother to take a look.

    And also, can you point us to something simple that you came up with? That would be great, cause we all can learn…

    Alex

16. David Mackey
    

    August 24th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

    Not a bad feature. I’ve been meaning to take another look at AdaptiveBlue since their recent release.