Glue and Glued
What do these pages on Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDb have in common? Obvious to you, dear reader, but perhaps not so to your browser or even to the search engine robot that just spidered them.
Enter Glue, a Firefox extension that connects users’ reviews of books, movies, etc. regardless of where they saw the items. The Glue toolbar lives at the top of your Firefox window and appears whenever you’re browsing content on Glue’s supported sites, with the goal of supporting an artifact-centered social network.
If what you care about are reviews from trusted friends (as opposed to those from strangers, which many sites provide already), Glue seems unlikely to be the answer: even if your friends have previously encountered and reviewed items you are later interested in, it seems that Glue won’t tell you until you’ve already stumbled upon them. But tackling the challenge of cross-site entity resolution and building a social network around the artifacts of our social engagement sounds worthwhile.
Also noted: User Modeling and Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems have merged to form the First and Seventeenth International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization. What will this newly glued-together conference hold? Find out this June in Trento, Italy. Anyone planning to attend?
- maxg
Cool.
Hey there,
Thank you for your review!
To your point about being silent until you come to the object. Thats the point of it. Glue is a contextual technology that is surfaced only when makes sense.
So unlikely the stuff that constantly bugs you with stream of hundreds of friends, Glue chunks this information and presents it contextually.
Alex
Thanks for helping to spread a bit of Glue
Glue does make it easy to find out what friends like. Currently this is accomplished in two ways:
1) you can see the books, movies, music, etc. that your friends have interacted with and whether they’ve liked the object. you can also read the short review that they may have attached to the item.
2) there’s a view that displays what’s most popular with friends.
In time we’ll be releasing an API and we believe that the views that developers will be able to construct with our data will be pretty engaging
See you around the web!
Fraser