Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Adaptive Blue today publicly released the Glue API for its semantically enabled browser-based social network. Third-party developers now can build Glue applications that take advantage of Glue’s ability to connect people and interests around the web.

AdaptiveBlue has built three applications itself: Stream, Quilt and Spider, which all expose different aspects of Glue. Stream shows what is happening in Glue live right now. Quilt shows the things that are popular based on the last 7 days of activity in Glue (at the top of the list today, on the heels of Apple’s worldwide developers’ conference were the iPhone 3G and the new Macbook Pro, followed by the new movie “The Hangover”). Spider lets you browse through the web of people and things, by focusing either on a person or a thing, says AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold. Focus on “The Hangover,” for instance, and you can find friends following it, and from there spider out to that friend’s other interests and connections.

Iskold says the API opens up the door to making it easier for users to find and distribute what they need faster, and for developers to leverage information from individual users as well as a rich set of aggregate popularity information.

“Users are able to easily export and share their attention and interest streams,” says AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold. “For example, a user can point a movie service like Netflix at a Glue movie stream, and the service will be able to generate better recommendations. Developers get access to a lot of interesting information. First, they can tap into popularity both for individual objects and the aggregate numbers. Also, developers can tap into the semantic part of the API and get meta data for hundreds of popular sites, using one simple interface.”

The API, which is REST based and relies on HTTP authentication, is free for up to 5,000 calls. Beyond that there will be a charge based on the usage, Iskold says, and per the API usage model, developers may not replace AdaptiveBlue’s affiliate links.

At SemTech 2009, AdaptiveBlue announced the winners of a contest it hosted for third-party developers building applications using Glue. The grand prize went to GlueToGo, which provides a light-weight way to access the information within the Glue network from any browser that’s connected to the web; it was built so that users of browsers that Glue doesn’t yet support can see friend reviews about books, music, and movies right on popular sites around the web. (Last week AdaptiveBlue also made its browser-based plug-in available for Internet Explorer; previously it worked only on Firefox. )

The runners-up, AdaptiveBlue heralds, are UnHub Movie Profiles, which sends Glue API the object key for a given movie and top links to the movie from around the web are returned. The user can then navigate to the best pages for reviews, trailers, and tickets with minimal clicks.

ShopFiber lets users collaborate to get information to make a purchase decision easier, faster, and at the best price — When a user submits a comment that includes a link to a suggested item, the Glue API is called and the suggested item is identified. Structured data is returned and inserted into the comment, adding complimentary information automatically to the comment, AdaptiveBlue says.

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