Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

AdaptiveBlue is all about the glue.

The company is changing the name of Blue Organizer, its browser add-on, which leverages personalization and semantics, to Glue. The name change reflects the fact that this is a pretty substantial upgrade, with a more straightforward user interface and user experience, the company says, while maintaining backwards compatibility with the previous version, such as contextual shortcuts.

Glue, as founder and CEO Alex Iskold describes it, is a contextual distribution network that utilizes semantic technologies to automatically connect people around things (music, movies, books, wine and other consumer interests) online, removing what he describes as the frictions of connecting around social networks. That friction comes in the form of the fact that it’s not easy for an Amazon book buyer, for example, to find out what their friends may have thought of a particular book — maybe, for example, they post their comments only to Goodreads, and you don’t belong to that network.

“Glue is completely decentralized,” says Iskold. “It’s distributed across popular sites. It’s an inversion of the network, where the network comes to the site instead of you having to go out of your way into the network. Most networks of today are silos. And it erases the time and spatial dimension — it doesn’t matter where or when people visit things. Glue automatically connects them.”

Here’s how it works: Say you are reading about the movie Ironman on Wikipedia (or one of the hundreds of popular sites, based on Alexa and Google rankings that are hard-wired into the system, or that implements AdaptiveBlue’s AB Meta markup format . A Glue bar appears at the top of the page, showing which of your friends and other recent people have looked into this movie anywhere on the web; you can mouse over them to find out where they visited the movie, how they learned about it, if they liked it, and if they made a comment about it. Similarly, if you were to look up the same movie on Fandango, you’d get the same information via the Glue Bar.

“Our semantic technology makes this possible, because we recognize in our system that we can uniquely identify this movie around the web, and so we collapse these pages into a single node in our system and then connect people around it,” says Iskold. “Glue would not be possible without our semantic technologies, because there is no way to meaningfully connect people around things without understanding and parsing out what things are. The fact that we have a giant database of objects on the back end that lets us correlate different pages and web sites is what makes Glue possible and powerful.”

Just as Glue automatically shows up on pages around things, so it gives users a way to bring their presence on the web to light, with Glue Profiles — what you recently looked at, your automatic likes and dislikes (based on its tally of whether you’re prone to click on objects like movies more than books), and so on. “The big picture idea is that when you look at things, you want to see the people around them and when you are looking at a person you want to see the things associated with this person,” says Iskold.

Of course, Glue will only scale along with its user base; to be represented on a Glue Bar, you’ll need to have installed Adaptive Blue’s browser add on. Currently AdaptiveBlue reports that it has over 350,00 active Blue Organizer users and over 1.6 million downloads. (Not all of them will be immediately converted to Glue, as AdaptiveBlue wants to spend some time monitoring feedback.) Other than installing the technology, users don’t have to do anything — they participate just by browsing their favorite web sites.

Iskold says the consumer market, overloaded with information as it is, needs some way to better make sense of all the input that’s out there. Today, information on social networks is out of context, he says — for example, if a person highlights a quote from a book on Friendfeed, that means something to that person at the time he writes it, but those lifestreams are out of context to visitors and so the meaning is hard for them to parse.

“Glue says lifestreams need to be delivered in context,” he says, delivered on demand only when it makes sense on the page that you are visiting. “So when you go on a Friday night to look at Fandango for a movie, what’s when you see the information about friends who interacted with this movie. That’s a fundamentally different tone — we want more contextual information on the web.”

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