If you want to add social smarts to your browsing experience, Glue by Adaptive Blue just got better. Glue is a Firefox add-on that uses semantic technology to understand the subject of the page you are on and shows you via a bar at the bottom of your browser whether your friends have commented or liked the item anywhere on the Web. Glue works for movies, books, games, restaurants, wines, stock charts, and more. (It is very product oriented).
The big new feature being rolled out today is product recommendations. Every time you click on the “like” heart, it recognizes what you are liking (movie, book, wine) and recommends other items in the same category based on your previous likes and those of your friends. You can now share your likes with your friends on Facebook as well (via Facebook Connect) or Twitter (which you could do before).
There is also a new “Shuffle” button which works like the Stumble button on StumbleUpon or the Random button on the Diggbar, except that it randomly generates a recommended page on the same topic. So if you are on Amazon looking at books and hit the “Shuffle” button, you will get another page with a recommended book, If you are looking t wines, you will get wine. And not necessarily from Amazon. The nice thing about Glue is that if a friend of yours “likes” a movie on Netflix via the Glue bar, it counts as a like when you look at that same movie on Amazon or Fandango or Yahoo Movies. (Here are all the sites Glue supports).
I’m still on the fence about having a bar that pops up as I browse because sometimes I don’t care what my Glue friends think. But I’m definitely going to give the recommendations a whirl. Discovery is always good.
Most importantly, they have one of the best t-shirts of all the startups.
I get the oddest looks walking around in my “I <3 GLUE” shirt.
We sure do
Check out some Glue-rs in their swag here: http://www.flic...s/adaptiveblue/
And feel free to request a shirt or sticker from: http://www.getglue.com/spread
Me @ Web 2.0 Expo in San Fran with mine on. Word. http://twitpic.com/2s0jy
That is a pretty cool shirt. BOX’s t-shirts say ” I <3 BOX”. We get a few odd looks ourselves!
As a dedicated Glue user (and t-shirt owner http://twitpic.com/9q2fn), I love this release. All I ask, is that Chrome gets its act together so I can run Glue on it!
I’m a hardcore Glue user and found these new features worked REALLY well. Sharing on Facebook feature is really well done and allows you to post any article or object that you’re looking at (with auto-populated thumbnails) straight onto your wall with a few clicks. Enabling those actions in context is a huge time saver. The recommendations/suggestions are also amazon-level accurate across all different types of media.
I find Glue to be very helpful when I land on a page that it recognizes. Encouraging more people to “like” things by rewarding them with recommendations should not only improve the individual user’s experience but the entire community’s.
Great feature.
Also, to check out what’s possible with the Glue API that TechCrunch has previously covered, check out what Vinicius and the team at UnHub have created:
http://unhub.com/a/movies
How do they plan to earn $$$?
We’re already generating some revenue via affiliate links
Sounds like they are set to be front page news on Forbes magazine and perhaps on Bloomberg soon!
Blerp is very similar to Glue and works on both Firefox and IE 7 & 8.
http://www.blerp.com
It’s worth checking out.
Hoff
Worth pointing out that Glue also works with Firefox and IE 7 & 8.
There’s also an embeddable version for blogs and websites (recently integrated by Random House, among other publishers and media companies).
neat idea.
In poor taste Alex Iskold and his Adaptive Blue named their product after ours:
http://GlueNow.com
We’ve been using the name in commerce since 2006 and have been in the top Google results for “glue” well before Adaptive Blue launched their product–Alex Iskold had to have known we had a product named Glue. Isn’t Google the first place you visit when considering a name?
http://www.flic...man/2872486832/
We’ve had many confused users, and it’s still a major issue for us. Adaptive Blue should relinquish the name Glue, it would be the right thing to do.