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.
Too many things called Glue these days!
Interesting stuff, but it’s information overload. How much do we really need to know?
It’s filtered based on your tastes and what your FB and Twitter friends liked so it cuts down on noise there.
Additionally, the add-on presents all of this information in context. So you’ll only see the information in a filtered way – when and where it makes sense.
stmbleupon did this years ago…bfd
That was years ago… nobody cares about eBay’s crappy stumbleupon anymore.
Stumbleupon was about urls.
Glue is about objects – books, movies, music.
It doesn’t matter if you like the book on Amazon or Wikipedia – we understand that it’s the same book and use that for suggestions and recommendations.
I like the idea of being able to see movies, products, and restaurants that my friends like… but I’m not sure this is the way to do it. Blasting a bunch of random objects in front of me, hoping that I’ll like at least a few of them, seems too complex.
Within GetGlue.com it’s like any stream – suggestions and friend favorites float by.
With the add-on installed, these suggestions and friend reviews are surfaced in contextually correct places – when you are looking at the specific item on popular pages.
I know it may sound intuitive, but do people really value product & media recommendations from friends more than from aggregated sources? I couldn’t care less what my friends like or dislike when it comes to stuff. Yelp, Amazon reviews, or Rottentomatoes are perfectly sufficient. Or reviews from Cnet if I need to get an opinion from an expert.
It seems that recommendations from friends make more sense for professional services like doctors, accountants, contractors, etc. than it does for movies or products.
Good question. It may not be that friend reviews are more interesting (we all have that friend with terrible tastes in movies) but we do believe that the following are valuable:
- trusted reviews
- knowing what your friend with similar movie tastes likes
- reviews from like-minded people
We’re working to solve all of these with Glue.
Looks this is yet another move from Adaptive Blue to find a real business model. Tell me about being adaptive. Should rename the company to Adaptive Glue.
People who like this concept should also check out OurShelf (a DreamIt Ventures company). In addition to getting reviews and recommendations from friends, OurShelf also lets you borrow, lend, personalize and post items for resale on craiglist. Adding items to your shelf is easy via import (we can even import all your Amazon past purchases).
We also support groups, social shopping, have a mobile version, and are in the process of integrating our social shopping features into online retail sites.
For more information, check out the About page: http://bit.ly/Z2FsA
Paul (CEO and cofounder)
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.
get a life. really…
you first. really…
Legally, So Awesome Man has a valid point and GetBlue can technically be taken over the coals on this one.
If there is evidence to prove that GetBlue has named a product identically after GlueNow’s ‘Glue’ legally bought the rights to that name then they could be sued over abuse of a registered trademark and name
, not to mention copyright
Apart from that, nice article
Regards
Craig
Not sure if you can trademark the word glue
Brands go back years. Do either of the companies have a trademark for the word glue? I would think it was hard to get. Seems like either party can make a easy case.Will be interesting to see it play out