THE DREAM IN ACTION

As described in their new release, “GetGlue.com is a social recommendation network for interests like books, music, and movies. GetGlue.com offers a stream of suggestions based on user interests, friends activity and things that are popular with everyone. Users can also add GetGlue to their browser to more quickly build their taste profile and get suggestions in context, on hundreds of popular sites like Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Wine.com and Citysearch.”

Today, they’ve announced a bunch of new features to their FireFox plug-in Glue, which I use on a daily basis. The changes are very interesting and I can already see how they’re going to make my browsing more fun. First I’ll tell you some of the new features, then I’ll tell you why I love the direction that the AdaptiveBlue team is going…

1. Suggestions Stream: A continuous stream of suggestions is generated for the users based on what they liked, friend’s favorites and everyone’s popular.

2. GetGlue Profiles: New profiles make it easy for users to save and share their favorite books, music and movies.

3. Stickers and Guru: Users can earn stickers for participating and get recognized as a Guru for things they actively comment on.

4. Browser Addon: Glue appears around the web providing in context suggestions, friend reviews, clips, and a way to quickly build a taste profile.

Now, the fun part, here’s why I think this is so cool. If you ever read this blog you probably know that I’ve a big fan of Foursquare, the bar/restaurant check-in game that connects the offline world and your friends via and online tool, so very well. Now GetGlue is doing that for online destinations (topics), and you don’t even have to check in. When I visit ‘Surfing’ for example on Wikipedia, GetGlue knows that I’m viewing it, then when I ‘like’ the topic on Glue it collects more information about my relation ship with surfing. Similarly, when I got to my local pub, I check in and Foursquare learns about my relationship with that pub. Now, I can become the Guru of a topic on the web. I just so happen to be the Guru of surfing :)

Because of AdaptiveBlue’s semantic web technology they are able to collect information (that I allow them to collect) and create an online profile that is likely more powerful than anything I could create on my own. They use the content that I browse on the web to build a profile for me. They sometimes are able to tell me things about myself that I didn’t even know. For example, why am I the guru of Brett Favre and not Philip Rivers (my home-town-team’s QB)? Am I a  traitor? NO!!!

If you’re not on FireFox you need to be, and the first plug-in you need to download is GetGlue, it will change the way your surf the web. It will allow you find more relevant stuff based on what your friends and looking at and it will make you more aware of what’s important to you. The technology has always been  amazing and now the usability and usefulness of the site will blow you away too.