Put The Social Web In Context With Glue's New Browser Plugin
Do you like to know what sort of music, movies, books, and other things your friends like? If so, you have a couple of options for following your friends' interests on the web today. You can either join a social network dedicated to sharing this information (think Goodreads, Flixster, Last.fm) or you can follow your friends on lifestreaming service like FriendFeed where you might happen upon a shared interest somewhere in their stream of updates. A third option would be to only see your friends' interests in context when you were actively viewing a book, movie, album, etc. on the web.
If that last option sounds appealing to you, then you've just been sold on the concept of Glue, a new semantic browser plugin that connects you to your friends around everyday things like books, movies, music, restaurants, and more.
What's Glue?
Glue is a new browser plugin from Adaptive Blue. It uses semantic technology to connect you to your friends around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. The plugin places a bar - not a toolbar, just a bar - at the top of your browser window when you visit certain popular web sites like Amazon, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, IMDB, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Last.fm, and many others.
As you read about the album, movie, book, or whatever else it is that you're viewing at the time, you'll have a toolbar at the top of the page where you can see which of your friends had visited the same page, if they liked it, and if they left a comment.
Glue Is Not Co-browsing
Glue is not a co-browsing plugin like Me.dium nor does it try to socialize the entire web surfing experience like Socialbrowse (our coverage). Also, unlike Headup, another semantic browser plugin we covered recently, Glue doesn't bother you with pop-up messages as you surf. Glue simply provides a social element to web pages in context - there's no destination site to join and your social graph doesn't need to be re-created in order to use it.
How It Works
In order to tap into your network of friends, Glue uses APIs from popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to import your friends. You can choose to import one or all of those friend lists into the plugin.
To participate in the Glue network, all you do is continue browsing the web normally. When you visit a supported site, the Glue friend bar appears. If you choose, you can view what your friends say about the item on the page, or you can ignore the bar and continue on your way. However, your visit is recorded and when one of your friends visits that same page, they can see that you've been there recently, though not the exact date or time your visit occurred. This information is only stored for the last 20 things you've visited on the web.
While surfing, if you want to share your thoughts about the item you're viewing, you can optionally use the Glue "like" button and/or the "2 cents" button which lets you add a quick thought about item. You can also click on the bar to see the profiles of your friends, other recent Glue users, and you can explore their interests even further by clicking into their profiles, which display in a pop-up box that appears when you click their avatar. You can also optionally click on "Actions" to explore the item you're viewing on other Glue-supported sites.
Making The Social Web Relevant
By providing this social experience in context, Glue can actually be more useful to you than simply joining isolated social networks surrounding your interests where your data and that of your friends is trapped inside the network's walls. It may also have some appeal over a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed, because you don't have to happen across the information - it's there when you're actively interested in something and have sought it out on the web.
In the official version coming soon, the company is also soon going to provide a method for any web publisher to "Glue-enable" their site by simply adding AB Meta to their sites, by inserting three lines of code in the header of a page.
Glue is the next generation of the Adaptive Blue plugin, a tool that currently has around 350,000 active users. Current Adaptive Blue users will find their plugin updated to Glue through the standard Firefox plugin update process. For everyone else, you can download the plugin here.
Although at the present time Glue is available as a Firefox plugin only, an IE version is in the works and an iPhone plugin will arrive in a few weeks.
Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's CEO, Alex Iskold, is a feature writer for RWW.
Comments
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They will need to overcome a barrier to download a plug-in to move beyond early adopters. Overall, it's good idea with an adoption hurdle.
Posted by: Yakov | October 28, 2008 1:07 PM
Congrats to Alex, Fraser and the rest of the AdaptiveBlue crew. I'm sure I speak for many of us who've enjoyed tinkering with the beta are all psyched to have seen the care and consideration that's gone into each new build of Glue. The more I use Glue, the more I like it. Once people see what's been accomplished with glue, I think you'll start seeing a lot more semantic/social browsing apps. Content in context is king.
Posted by: Steffan Antonas
|
October 28, 2008 1:10 PM
Interesting indeed. I've installed the addon, and have a few questions:
1) for some people, this may sound like "your tracking my online activities and showing all my friends what im doing. how can i opt out of specific sites/services?".
2) how do i turn the bar off if I dont want it on, lets say, Amazon.com.
3) why is my firefox status bar in an endless loop when im looking at an Amazon page. It looks like its trying to connect to something, then stops, then starts, etc infinite.
4) whats the point of having a summary tab when looking at a book inside Glue if Im already on Amazon.com? If im on a book page with all the details about that book, why would I want to look at the summary of the same book inside Glue?
4) who are these random people appearing in my Glue bar? i have not friended them...are they seeing me as well?
Very interesting addon, and would like to watch this progress over the coming months.
Ben
Posted by: ben | October 28, 2008 1:15 PM
Hi Ben, thanks for all of the great questions - I've taken a stab at addressing them below. Please let me know if you have any more. fraser[at]adaptiveblue
1) Glue is only active on pages about everyday things - books, movies, music, etc. You can protect your presence from your profile so that only people that you approve can see your interactions with these objects. Additionally, you can delete your connection to any thing by mousing over our avatar in the Glue bar and selecting 'delete.' This same function exists while looking at your collection of things - mouse over the thing and select delete.
2) Glue's great because it's not a toolbar that permanently consumes browser space. It only appears when it makes sense and it appears as part of the html. To get rid of the Glue bar simply scroll down.
3) This should not be happening - can you email me the link to the page that you were on? If you refresh the page does the same issue occur?
4) The summary tab that's available while on an object's page is there to remain consistent with functions that are available around an object. Once you activate the Glue navigator and browse through the web of people and things the benefit of the details view for an object becomes apparent.
5) They are other Glue users who have interacted with the same everyday thing that you are currently looking at. They can see you. If you protect your presence they can not see you. If you're on a page with more friends you'll see less recent people and more friends by default.
Hope this helps!
Fraser
Posted by: Fraser | October 28, 2008 1:28 PM
I've been a user of BlueOrganizer and now Glue since beta. Have to say I cherish it's Swiss army knife approach the most.
I probably don't spend enough time on Amazon and "things" web pages. Would be great if it could also treat blog articles as objects.
But back to the swiss army knife metaphor. Tweeting, tinyurling, subscribing, everything that a power-information-worker needs (well some more on the wishlist, but one step at a time).
(Disclosure: My company Zemanta and AdaptiveBlue share one common investor.)
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
Posted by: Andraz Tori | October 29, 2008 7:13 AM
I would like to start by first congratulating A.B on their latest launch.
At the same time, however, I do want to comment about the claim that was made on our product, headup:
headup doesn't "bother you with pop-up messages as you surf". To interact with headup, one simply click on a "plus" icon next to the object that he or she care about. There are 0 "pop-ups" in the product.
Additionally, there are quite striking differences between the products, but I'll leave those for now, and just wish the AB team best of luck.
Sincerly,
Tal Keinan - SemantiNet
Posted by: Tal Keinan | October 29, 2008 11:27 AM
isn't this sound crazy.. now we need to introduce some privacy control web 2.0 software as well..
Posted by: Social Media Marketing Blog | October 30, 2008 3:01 PM
Glue rots! It is malware. It installed on my browser like a monster. I never installed it.
Posted by: Charles | November 17, 2008 10:00 PM
It appears that someone has removed my original comment. Awesome!
Apparently someone didn't do their homework... or just lacks integrity.
There is already a product named Glue since 2006. http://gluenow.com
Sounds like a great product but stealing a product name is not cool.
Posted by: Jordan Dobson - Glue | November 19, 2008 12:48 PM