I've written about social recommendation network Glue before, noting that it is a social network that is just along for the ride as a Firefox/IE extension that slides out when you need it. The basic idea is that when you visit a site that's supported by Glue (IMDB, Amazon, Wikipedia, Last.fm, and a lot more), the Glue extension will slide out and tell you what your friends thought about that particular piece of content and give you the option to review it yourself. It's a great concept where the information comes to you instead of you having to seek it out. Today, Glue is adding a more traditional profile-based system to the site, which provides more incentives for users to contribute regularly.
Glue investor Fred Wilson's new profile on the site, complete with Stickers and Guru.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Adding a "game dynamic" to your service is a proven technique that boosts user engagement. Glue is hoping to do just that with its new profile system on GetGlue.com. It is taking a page out of Foursquare's book and adding "Stickers" for user accomplishments and declaring "Guru" status for those who comment most frequently on a particular piece of content.
The similarities to Foursquare's Badges and Mayor features are pretty apparent here. Glue's Founder and CEO Alex Iskold commented, "We've been admiring what Foursquare did to encourage people to engage with their service." On the subject of the Guru feature, Iskold told us that, "Guru is something that we developed to encourage people to really engage around things they love. Unlike Mayor, being a Guru is a bunch more work, since you need to actively comment on things to stay the Guru."
Glue is also adding suggestions, presented in the form of a stream. As you give the thumbs up to pieces of content throughout the Web, these suggestions will evolve and become more targeted. Their algorithm also takes into consideration what your friends' favorites are as well as the overall favorites for the community. Hopefully your own ratings have some more weight than popular content, or else Metallica fans might be staring down streams filled with Miley Cyrus.
Even though I like the hands-off nature of Glue's browser extension, I think that their profile system is a strong addition to the service. The new game dynamic will certainly drive more user interaction as people compete for Guru status and collect Stickers for their profile. Glue also threw a couple of new statistics our way to give us an idea of their growth. Currently, the service is getting a new rating every three seconds and a total of 1.2 million new interactions between people and things every month.
Here's a nice video that the guys at Glue put together for this release to explain the service:
Glue, the popular Firefox extension that lets users discuss content all over the web, is releasing a version of its add-on, built for Internet Explorer, today. This is a big step for Glue for a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that being compatible with IE expands Glue's potential audience significantly. Net Applications reports that IE currently holds 65.5% of the browser market to Firefox's 22.51%. Being able to reach 88% of the internet browsing population should increase their registered user base of 130,000 significantly.
The other reason why this release is significant is the sheer accomplishment of developing a good, functional IE add-on like this. It took the people at AdaptiveBlue four months of work to bring Glue to Internet Explorer. Instead of taking the cheap way out, they reworked the code for Glue so that 90% of it is the common core that can work on any platform, with the additional 10% being platform specific code. This not only means that the add-on works consistently across both IE and Firefox, but that it will be much easier to develop for other browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, in the future.
If you haven't tried Glue yet, give CNET's initial write-up a read and check it out if you're interested. I'm looking forward to some cool things from these guys in the future.
There is something about the Semantic Web that gets me all excited about the future of the Internet. Services like Glue are making sense of data all across the Web and allowing users to interact with it.
CNET News' Dan Farber has covered the basic functionality of Glue, but to recap, after installing the Glue Firefox extension, when you visit supported sites about movies, music, books, or other included categories, the Glue bar will slide down, giving you the opportunity to give your input on the product.
One of the things Glue is introducing today is the ability to interact with a piece of content and have a discussion across multiple sites. For example, if I visit the Wikipedia page on the film "Slumdog Millionaire" and write a review of it on Glue, my friends see my review when they visit the "Slumdog Millionaire" page on any of the supported sites, including Amazon.com, Fandango, IMDb, Metacritic, Netflix, and many others.
The opinions of your friends on any particular piece of content just appear as you browse. Today, Glue is releasing the latest version of its service, featuring improvements in content recommendation, Facebook Connect integration, and the improvements to conversations noted above.
In this release, Glue has included support for Facebook Connect. This is going to be a big step forward for the service. The main challenge that new users face when signing up for a new social network is finding their friends. Now Glue users can automatically grab their social graph from Facebook and interact with their friends in Glue.
The "connected conversations" feature that I talked about briefly a couple of paragraphs above is probably the most impressive aspect of this release. Having all of your friends' opinions on a particular product, combined so that you can view them, regardless of what site you choose to browse for the content on, is very powerful.
Glue almost completely eliminates the friction involved with getting your friends' opinions on whether you should buy, rent, or watch that movie you've been eying. The Glue bar slides down at just the right moment when you are wondering what your friends think about the movie and happily reports their feedback.
The week's most popular movies on Glue.
Glue has also added some nice recommendation features. Glue now breaks down what content is popular in the various categories within your circle of friends and in the entire Glue population. This should help with some additional content discovery and prove to be interesting in trend monitoring. Maybe the "worldwide top lists" can fill the void left by Facebook Pulse in keeping track of what's hot.
This release of Glue is definitely a solid offering, and I think that the additions of Facebook Connect and connected conversations make it a really killer product. The best part of the product is that it doesn't bug you on a constant basis, but it provides useful information on your friends' opinions when you are looking for it.
Being a fairly painless Firefox Extension install, Glue is worthy of at least a test run. Load up your Facebook friends, browse around, and let us know what you think of Glue.
- prev
- 1
- next
