Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

AdaptiveBlue unveiled its latest release of Glue today, adding both major and minor features to the semantically enabled browser plug-in.

How does Glue work? “Connected conversations” leverages the semantic engine under the hood — which knows that a certain book on Amazon, for example, is the same as the one on Barnes & Noble — to make it possible for friends who follow each other on Glue to engage in discussion about that object across sites. With Glue enabled, you can surface from any of the hundreds of supported web sites a list of those who have commented on a particular book, movie, restaurant, etc. on any venue (you might be viewing a movie title on Blockbuster, for instance, while a friend left a comment about it on Netflix); view the replies that were made to your friend’s comment; and opt into the thread yourself — all from right where you are. Your friend could see your reply from his Glue inbox, and you can see any feedback left for you directly in your own.

“This thread travels wherever you go,” says founder and CEO Alex Iskold.

This is part of the new “Glue for You” feature that also aims to resolve what Iskold calls the paradox of the modern age. “We live in an age of networks but it’s still hard to know what friends think and to connect with each other,” he says.

Also part of this feature is the ability to surface smart lifestreams
– that is, you can get friends’ recommendations on items by Glue’s automatically aggregating friends activity from across the web so that you can instantly see what books, music, and other things your friends like the best. “Instead of showing you a stream of noise we show you one screen of a signal,” says Iskold. You can see what all your friends on Glue are paying attention to, most popular items showing up on the left and less popular ones on the right.

“We’re beginning to see what the semantic web experience should be like,” he says. “It’s not a singular notion of us annotating web page, but having holistic and different new experiences. … It’s still early days and raw, but we’re starting to feel what this experience is going to be like.”

The final major feature is the new web wide popularity lists. It aggregates all the data about the top books, movies, and other objects daily, based on the attention those objects have gotten from Glue users over the past seven days. It can aggregate, for instance, all the Glue users who looked at a particular book on multiple sites to come up with a list of the top books getting web viewer eyeballs for that week.

“Every time people look at things they vote with their attention. That’s not possible without a semantic engine,” he says. “Otherwise you just get Amazon’s or some other site’s own list of best sellers in a silo vs. an aggregation of these things across the web.”

Minor feature updates include a slimmer Glue bar, and the ability to automatically synch within Glue with your friends from sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s also manually added more sites, including the ABC network, to its list of supported content, as a pragmatic way of bridging the gap when those sites aren’t formatted appropriately for automated inclusion in its list.

Iskold says Glue has seen 110,000 installs and conversions since it was introduced in the fall, with 35,000 active users at this point. About 20 percent of its active users have downloaded its application for the iPhone.

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