‘Glue’ Toolbar: Your Friends Are in Your Web, Helping You
Social networks connect you to your friends; but so what? So does mass transit. Being connected to your friends is nothing new, but being able to get your friends’ insights even when they aren’t around is new.
For instance, can you visit Amazon to check out a book and see what your friends thought about the same book when they viewed it on Google Books or Wikipedia or any other site? No? then you’re not using Glue, the new toolbar from Adaptive Blue.
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.
There’s no destination site for Glue, it simply lives in your toolbar and pulls from all the social networks you’re already using. The result is the ability to track what your friends like, but only when it’s in context and worth knowing about.
Adaptive Blue has been building software tools with similar functionality for years. Its previous add-on for Firefox, Blue Organizer, exposed links to buy the books, CDs or movies you were reading about on any web page. Glue is replacing Blue Organizer. That’s the right move here — Blue Organizer was the sort of thing only a nerd could love, but this time Adaptive Blue aimed for everyone.
The real appeal of Glue is its ability to connect data across sites. You can look at movie on IMDb and see what your friends thought — even if they happened to look at the movie on Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes or another movie-related site.
To get started with Glue, just download the toolbar. At the moment Glue works wherever Firefox does, but Adaptive Blue is planning to release versions for Internet Explorer, and even the iPhone, in the very near future.
Once Glue is installed, just create and account and sign in; Glue will offer to grab your Facebook profile shot and find your friends if you’d like.
Now, whenever you visit a page that contains something Glue is aware of — a book, album, restaurant, etc. — the Glue Bar will drop down and give you access to your friends’ reviews and opinions. To the left side of the screen are your friends, on the right side you’ll find the last 20 people that visited the page, regardless of whether or not you’re following them.
Similarily, other Glue users will be able to see your comments and what pages you’ve looked at, though Glue does have its privacy bases covered. You can always delete comments and hide your presence on individual pages, or you can turn on a completely private profile which acts just like similar features on Twitter — users must be approved before they can view your profile or see your comments.
To participate you can either “like” something or add your “two cents” — a short, 140 character, Twitter-like comment. You can also tell Glue to automatically Twitter whatever you put in your two cents.
For more options just click on the object itself in the top left corner of the Glue Bar and you’ll be able to read everyone’s comments, see a summary of the item or choose from the list of “actions.” Actions are dependent on context, but common options include adding the item to your Netflix queue, buying it on Amazon, finding more reviews on other sites and looking for related content on YouTube, Flixster and other networks.
Glue is the single most useful social networking tool I’ve encountered and using it is actually much simpler than describing what it does. To see Glue in action, check out the video below from Adaptive Blue. You can grab the latest version of Glue from the Mozilla Add-ons website.
Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.
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