Glue Update Offers ‘Connected Conversations,’ Better Recommendations
Have you ever wondered why you can’t see movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes when you’re on IMDb, or read what your Facebook friends thought about a new book while you’re on Amazon? Sadly, information is still trapped in little silos on individual websites. Someday, we’ll look back at all these silos of information and laugh about how lame the web was.
In the mean time, you might want to try out the Firefox extension Glue.
Created by AdaptiveBlue, the same company that brought you the popular BlueOrganizer add-on, Glue is a social network without a website. Instead of visiting a site to find out what your friends think, Glue brings your friends along as you travel the web.
The beauty of Glue lies in its simplicity — as you browse the web and check out pages about things that Glue recognizes (books, music, movies, restaurants, etc.), the “Glue Bar” slides down and shows you what your friends thought of the same things, regardless of what site they viewed it on. For more background on Glue and how it works, see our earlier write up.
The latest version of Glue adds two cool new features that make it worth the update: “Connected Conversations” and a new “Glue for You” recommendation engine.
What Glue calls “Connected Conversations” are really just comments. Here’s how it works: your friend reviews a movie on Amazon.com. You happen to be browsing Wikipedia and come across the page for the same movie. The Glue toolbar then shows your friend’s review from Amazon. Very handy, but what if you want to respond to what your friend wrote? That’s exactly what connected conversations allow you to do.
Naturally the replies from you (or any of your other friends) are nicely threaded and can be seen either on the relevant page or in your main Glue window.
The other major new feature in Glue is a recommendation engine based on what your friends have liked — Glue aggregates the information and shows which books, movies and music you might be interested in. Assuming you and your friends have similar tastes, the recommendation engine works quite well.
There are also some other minor, but welcome changes in the latest version of Glue — the toolbar itself is little narrower to save on screen real estate, quick reviews can be automatically cross posted to Twitter, FriendFeed and the like, and Facebook Connect integration makes it easy to find your friends when you first get started with Glue.
Also welcome news for those of you who live on the edge, the update means that Glue now works with the Firefox 3.1 betas. You can grab the latest version of Glue here.
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