Glue Comes To Its Senses And Launches A Destination Stream

Adaptive Blue’s Glue is a nifty Firefox add-on that uses semantic technology to understand the subject of the page you are on and then 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 lets you share your likes with friends on Facebook (via Facebook Connect) and on Twitter. Until now, Glue tried to show you everything at the bottom of your browser on related pages, which can be obtrusive and annoying to the browsing experience. Today, Glue is branching out from just a plug-in to being a full-fledged destination site with a social product recommendation stream from your friends.

Glue’s destination site, GetGlue.com, is a recommendation network for people with the same interests in books, music, movies and other products. Starting later today, the site will offer a stream of suggestions based on user interests, friends activity and things that are popular with all of Glue’s users. The site is integrated with Glue’s revamped browser plug-in to get suggestions in context on sites like Amazon, Wikipedia, Last.fm, Netflix, Wine.com and Citysearch.

Once you set up a profile on GetGlue and connect to Facebook and Twitter, you will receive a continuous, customized stream of suggestions that are generated based on what you like. So if you liked the movie the “Godfather,” GetGlue would recommend “Goodfellas” to you. Glue will also identify which of your Facebook friends are using GetGlue and will import their recommendations into your stream. By seeing these recommendations in stream form, you are able to see what your social network is liking now, which adds a real-time, interactive component that was lacking previously.

And you can see a stream with the top product recommendations from all Glue users, letting you see what’s popular at the time. You can either “Like” a product from within your profile or via the plug-in. The site lets you create a profile where you can save and share your favorite books, music and movies.

GetGlue’s site is also adding a gaming component to profile by letting users earn “stickers” for actively participating in the site and commenting on items. And if you are an uber-fan of a particular movie, book, or musician/band/album, you can become a Guru.

Glue has also spiced up its browser add-on to provide contextual suggestions on a page, friend reviews, clips, and a way to quickly connect to your GetGlue profile. For example, if you were browsing on the “Godfather” site on Wikipedia, the plug-in would bring up the movie trailer, the Rotten Tomatoes score, and will let you add the movie to your Netflix account.

It’s wise that Glue has moved beyond just being a browser plug-in. There is definitely power in social recommendation (i.e. Facebook Likes) and GetGlue has the power to create a stream of personalized recommendations around social products, such as movies, books and music. Consumers enjoy seeing what their friends like and dislike and Glue serves this purpose without having to really reinvent their social graph.