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.

As the Adaptive Blue team wrote in their blog post about this new release, this update is “One Small Step for Glue, One Giant Leap for Usability”, and they are right. Before today, I always thought of Glue as the intangible social network. The data was out there, and valuable, but it wasn’t easy or clear how I could share or analyze that data. Now it’s easy to do that. Now with the profile page on GetGlue.com/ryangraves I’m defined by the content that I define as favorites. I love that.

The GetGlue team has done an awesome job of listening to their user community to figure out how to make the experience better and better. Here’s what they said about listening to their community.

We’ve heard consistently from the community that one way to improve the Glue experience is to break free from the small overlay and provide a richer experience for browsing a user’s collection of books, movies, and music.

Today, with the launch of Profile and Object pages on GetGlue.com, we’re taking the first of many planned steps to address this.

Here’s a view, a description and some *thoughts on the value that these new features provide to it’s users and the web in general.

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A few months back I shared an awesome Firefox plug-in called GLUE. GLUE sits inside your browser and picks up data about what your viewing, what your friends are viewing, and shares that information with your contacts. The beauty behind GLUE is that it uses something called semantic technologies, which means that it find the meaning behind your communication with friends.

So, what’s new in GLUE?

1) You’ve always been able to ‘add your 2cents’ to an object and let people know if you like it, but now with that comment you’ve started a conversation around that topic. You can have full fledged debates if you like all within GLUE. As and example you can see here that after watching Slumdog Millionaire I though “bollywood is pimp”, now I’m just waiting for someone to respond. Did you dig Slumdog?

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AdaptiveBlue publically launched their new product today called Glue. My friend, Fraser Kelton, the VP of Business Development at AdaptiveBlue hooked me up with the product about a month ago through their private beta and it is awesome. It uses semantic web technologies to literally link your friends to the objects you view on the web. The company is focused on developing “personalization technologies that leverage semantics and attention”.  The number one thing that jumped out at me while using this product was ease of use.

Glue basically pulls the objects you consume ( any book, music, movie, or everyday consumer item that you view) and associates those products with you. Then as others view your sites (Blog, Twitter, etc.) or the host sites that host those products (eBay, Amazon, Last.fm, etc.), it shares your interests with others. Obviously, there are extreme monetization opportunities here. You get product recommendations from the people who are most influential to you, your friends!

Most web apps today have a purpose and a problem they are attempting to solve, but often times the barriers to making these application useful are large. The web applications that will really gain a lot of traction (quickly) are those where barriers to usefulness* are minimal or non-existent. Services like Plaxo and Facebook that now suggest friends based on the social graph behind the platform are incredibly effective ways to promote their product. Useful and easy = low barrier to entry. AdaptiveBlue has dominated this concept with their Glue product by automatically connecting or suggesting people to follow/friend based on similar product interests. They essentially develop your ‘product based’ social graph for you. Obviously they give you the option to ‘find friends’ because that manual process is still necessary as the technology is today, but eventually we will be able to add a service and it will automatically know who my friends are for that type of service. (!!!startup idea!!!)

If I’m viewing a product on Amazon it will show me which of my friends ‘liked’ or ‘gave their 2 cents’ on the product. Also, they will suggest others who liked the product (minimal barriers to usefulness).

See Glue bar on top of the page: On my blog other users who have Glue will be able to see a list of the products that I’ve viewed, like, or rated.

And finally like any good Web 2.0 application, I can create a profile with an avatar and personal information for others to use to rate my credibility or generally find more info about me.

After using Glue for about 2 weeks I found a book recommended from Eric Olson called “Creative Capital” which is the story of the father of Venture Capital, Georges Doriot. I never would have found out about the book without the product. I wasn’t looking for a book recommendation but just through the hidden social web that Glue builds I ended up making a purchase. Now you see the value, right?

Overall, I think that AdaptiveBlue is headed in the exact right direction. Bringing people and their activities closer and closer together. Unfortunately the majority of their products can only be used in Firefox as plug-ins, which is a huge limiter at this point. But, at such an early stage of development I think that the concepts behind their design in on point. Union Square Ventures is an investor in AdaptiveBlue which in my eyes is a success and a step in the right direction in its own right.

Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

Give Glue a shot and lets make product recommendations to each other. Let me know what you think of the tool!