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Check-in apps are all the rage in the mobile space, but these days users aren't just checking into business and landmarks. Apps like Miso and Facebook's recent acquisition Hot Potato, which allow users to check-in to movies, TV shows, books and other activities, have been part of the fuel behind the recent check-in craze. Another player in the "check-in to anything" game is GetGlue, whose popularity ballooned after the launch of its iPhone app earlier this summer. Today, the startup hopes to build on its success with the release of an Android app, a mobile website and new brand partnerships.

A few weeks ago I wrote that we've moved to an era of the Web that is beyond social. My contention is that successful services of this era of the Web will be ones that filter, structure and personalize the vast amount of data coming onto the Web. An example of this kind of application is Hunch, which this week re-launched as an Internet personalization service. Hunch is one of a number of modern web services aiming to connect you not only to other people, but to products and objects.

Hunch co-founder and Chief Product Office Caterina Fake told Wired in a recent profile that "the ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."

Do you want to chat with friends who are watching the same TV shows you are or reading the same books? Do you want to check in to record and share a history of your offline entertainment activities? Many startups think you will and the number of apps for that is growing fast.

The latest entry into the field is from GetGlue, a startup that offers a popular plugin for social Web browsing, that just announced its iPhone app for entertainment check-ins today. The service stands out in the field as one of the only offerings that features books and other activities, and it has an excellent recommendation feature that's sure to be adopted by competitors in time. What are other startups doing in this market? Below we offer a feature comparison between GetGlue and competitors HotPotato, Kickfour, Tunerfish, Miso and Philo.

Last month Facebook announced a new standardized way to mark up web pages concerning things like books, movies, music and more. It was called the Open Graph Protocol and was ostensibly intended to make the web comprehensible to computers building a profile of your interests across many different websites.

Unfortunately, it wasn't implemented very well, according to GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold. Iskold, a long-time contributor to this site, penned the most extensive guide to understanding Facebook's Open Graph and a critique of how it was constructed, implemented by launch partners and by Facebook itself. Yelp, IMDB and Pandora for example were all launch partners but have implemented the system incompletely or not at all, even several weeks after launch. Now Iskold has taken his own company's competing semantic markup of pages around the web and used it to build a replacement for a large part of the Facebook code in the wild - using Facebook's own format. Developers interested in understanding the content across 300 major websites, in Facebook's own terms, can now find a robust source of data at GetGlue.

It's hard to keep up with all the newly released movies and music these days, but a lightweight social network with a whole lot of smarts under the hood says it can now offer you personalized recommendations of new releases that suit your very particular interests.

GetGlue is a semantic web browser plug-in that has, for years, been smart enough to recognize when you're looking at the same musical group across different websites, be that on Last.fm, MySpace or elsewhere. The service recently added a stream of recommendations of music, movies, books, magazines, wikipedia articles and other things you might like. How can it tell what you'll like when something is brand new, though? Today the service has launched a "new releases" section, where human editors rush to classify brand-new media. Then the semantic robots can serve it up to the right users, still hot out of the oven. It's pretty cool.

Once just a browser add-on that allowed users to surf smarter across several verticals, AdaptiveBlue's Glue is now a site-centric product that acts as both a hub and a spoke of the social web.

Glue's synaptic web-esque technology is based on a user's browsing across common sites such as Amazon, Wikipedia and YouTube, and those visits and any interactions (comments, "likes," etc.) feeding back to automatically create a taste profile and a web of affinity with other users and recommendations of other items or content across about a dozen categories, including music, books and movies. So, can this be done without violating users' privacy or - worse yet - frustrating and boring them into attrition?