Glue: The New Update

Back in November, I told you about Glue. Then in January, I told you about SmartLinks. Well today is a special day. Glue has come out with a new updated version that is so much better than before if you can believe that! It is more interactive and keeps Glue as a valuable tool through out your book or other browsing from site to site.

About Glue

Glue is a contextual network that uses semantic technology to automatically connect people around everyday things - books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants and more.

Glue appears on popular sites like Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, Citysearch and many more, revealing friends and other Glue users who visited the same thing around the web.

1. Glue connects in a smarter way: Finding out what friends think of the books, music, and movies that you visit is work. Logging into social networks, checking emails, and sending IMs - require leaving the page. Glue removes this friction by surfacing the social network in context.
2. Glue builds the network automatically: Users participate in the network simply by browsing their favorite sites around the web - without changing their habits. Also, Glue enables users to leverage their existing Facebook and Twitter social graphs.
3. Glue enables networking around popular sites: Glue is decentralized and distributed across popular sites. It does not matter when or where the users visit things, Glue automatically connects them. There is no destination site, the network is always in the user's context across the web.

New in This Release

1. Connected Conversations: Glue enables web wide contextual conversations around books, movies, music and other everyday things. Now users can discuss the things they like with their friends regardless of which sites they all visit.
2. Smart Recommendations: Glue automatically aggregates friends activity from across the web so that users can instantly see what books, music, and movies their friends like the most. Simply by using Glue, users implicitly recommend things to their friends and benefit from friends recommendations.
3. Web Wide Top Lists: Glue features web wide top lists of popular books, music, movies and other everyday things. These lists are calculated based on the aggregate weekly activity of all Glue users. The lists reveal what things users are paying attention to as they browse the web.

Glue: Likes, Comments, and Replies from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

Glue FAQ

1. What things/sites does Glue work on?
This release of Glue automatically recognizes books, movies, music, artists, stars, stocks, restaurants and wine on hundreds of popular sites around the web. Glue works on Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm, Rhapsody, IMDB, Google Finance, Citysearch, Wine.com just to name a few. Here is a full list of Glue supported sites.

2. How does Glue recognize things?
Glue uses top-down semantic recognition technology to identify everyday things in pages around the web. A mix of client-side and server-side algorithms are used to create a unique key that correlates, for example, a book on Amazon as the same book on Barnes and Noble and other book sites. Using this approach Glue rewires the web of pages into the web of things and facilitates a new way for people to connect.

3. How does Glue handle privacy and data security?
AdaptiveBlue is committed to privacy and puts the users in control of their data. Glue only focuses on things like books, music and movies, it is not active on other pages. The user information is stored securely using Amazon S3 and SimpleDB - popular and trusted Amazon Web Services. The users own their information and are able, at any time, to delete it from the system. AdaptiveBlue does not sell personal or aggregate information about the system. For more on this topic, please visit our Privacy Policy page.

4. How does Glue leverage the existing Social Graph?
Glue enable users to automatically connect with their Twitter and Facebook friends. The user can choose to automatically sync her friends from other social networks. So when new friend joins Glue or new relationship is created on Facebook or Twitter there is a mirror relationship in Glue.

I am excited, because now for example my friend Lindsey can leave her 2 cents on Glue on a book and then I can comment on her comment. I think it's great and it really brings us together more on items. The websites that I use that I frequent with Glue are: Netflix, Goodreads, Twitter, my blog, other blogs with Glue added, Facebook, Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and a couple others.

Glue is definitely an enjoyable part of my book organization online. I would hate to have to book blog without it.

Go see about it! http://www.getglue.com/