Glue Yourself to Your Friends

I found Get Glue by way of a mention on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog—thanks, Jeremiah! It’s an interesting concept, and I did a bit of exploring.

The basic idea is that you can share reviews, opinions etc. with your friends without interrupting your web browsing. Here’s what they say:

Developed by AdaptiveBlue, Glue enables you to connect with your friends on the web around the things you visit online. Glue is powered by semantic recognition technology that automatically identifies books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists, and more. Glue works hard to make it easy for you to find out what your friends think about things you're visiting online.

They have a brief video on their home page that says what they do, but not much about how it actually works. I explored as much as I could without signing up. What I found is interesting. Here’s a capture of the Glue Stream. As you can see by the pull-down, you can get streams specifically for books, movies or music. You can just let the stream scroll by or you can pause it, presumably to follow follow the link in the stream item.

I found the most interesting function to be the spider. It has the same choices—books, movies and music and adds specific users. I choose books because the new book Free by Chris Anderson, which I’m thinking about buying, was there. When I clicked on it, I was shown the users who had commented on it, and where. That’s useful if I want to find reviews beyond the ones I normally look at on Amazon. When I clicked on a specific user I was taken to a view of that person’s reviews, comments, etc. Cool! I went to the “popular users,” clicked on Glue Classic, and one of them turned out to be a restaurant I know. Four people had reviewed the restaurant. Hum—this is beginning to sound both interesting and useful!

I couldn’t get into any of the specific reviews because I haven’t signed up yet. However, I’m fascinated. It looks like a user can get a lot of useful peer reviews and comments here. We’re well aware that peer reviews are a prerequisite for purchasing for a lot of us these days, so that’s good.

Is it also a way for monitoring content about your own book, restaurant, whatever? It seems obvious that it is. It also looks like you’d have to do that manually for now, but it’s easy to do, and the reach of Get Glue seems to make it worth the effort.

This is Web 3.0 stuff, in that it’s based on semantic technologies. They’re searching quantitative data and making it easy to follow things or people you’re interested in. As I understand it, the service follows the user around the web, so it indexes your activity without effort on your part. If that creeps you out, then Get Glue isn’t for you. If you do this sort of commenting/reviewing to provide info to other people (isn’t that the main reason?), then maybe you want an easy way to share what you do, making it more readily visible to more people.

Yes, definitely interesting!