Glue, a social network coupled with a Firefox add-on, manages to bring usefulness to the feature list ““ providing you with recommendations from your friends and from the Glue community, on movies, music, restaurants and more directly in your browser. It was created by Adaptive Blue, a New York based startup launched in 2006 by Alex Iskold. Glue is based on the so-called “semantic recognition technology”, a new buzzword that probably attracted the investors from Union Square Ventures and RRE Ventures.
The semantic web, as Wikipedia puts it, is:
an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.
In this case, semantic recognition technology means that Glue can figure out when you are visiting a web page about the same “books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists” as your friends, but not necessarily on the same website.
If your friend left a comment on, let’s say, Slumdog Millionaire’s page on IMDB, that comment would also show in the Glue toolbar when you are visiting the Wikipedia page of the same movie. The technology basically aggregates information from across the web and serves it back according to “˜semantics’.
After you go to getglue.com and install the 500KB add-on, you’ll be presented with a bar at the top of the page you’re visiting. This bar shows friends that have liked the same thing you’re looking at as well as their comments. You can add it to your favorites or leave replies/comments.
It’s extremely easy to use Glue, it doesn’t seem to slow down Firefox and it only shows up when it detects one of the aforementioned categories i.e. you won’t see Glue popping up on the Wikipedia page for LHC.
It connects to Facebook ““ which makes importing friends easy for you and gives them a great opportunity for exponential growth. They also invite you to give your Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Linkedin, FriendConnect and Myspace in order to allow fellow Glue users to “instantly see your books, music, movies, and more!”. However, it’s vey easy to close your account from: Glue For You>Account>Delete Account.
If you’re not sure yet whether to install Glue or not, check out this short video which explains how Glue works:
Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.
Glue is definitely a very interesting and useful Firefox add-on, and I invite you to try it and let us know in the comments what you think about it.
Tagged: addons • browsers • firefox • recommendations
