Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Right on the heels of its announcement of GetGlue.com, AdaptiveBlue wants to get sticky with developers. This week it’s unveiled its new Glue API, some five months after its initial steps to woo third-party developers to build Glue applications that leverage its technology’s ability to connect people and interests around the web.

There were about a dozen applications built using the first version of the Glue API, says AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold. “The most notable ones were Glue To Go, which offered a bookmarklet for Glue to be used in browsers that we did not support and Movies application by UnHub.” The latter creates a one stop site for researching a movie.

The new API adds a few powerful things for semantic web development, Iskold says. He enumerates:

▏ It’s possible to query, as an example, all the people who visited a particular movie on Netflix or IMDB by URL. This comes courtesy of the ability for any query of objects (such as movies) to accept an objectID that can be either a Glue ID OR a URL.

▏ The reverse lookup in this release enables developers to get all the links to an object on the web that Glue knows about. For example, they can send in a book key and get links to all locations of that book on Amazon, B&N, NYTimes reviews, and so on. “This is like what Google returns, except it’s highly filtered to the book vertical/quality links,” Iskold says.

▏ AdaptiveBlue also has expanded the set of things that are available via the API, as well as the set of sites it recognizes. Developers can get metadata for any URL from http://getglue.com/sites.

The company has opened up its metadata and links to more than 3 million objects (books, movies, music), and each one has 20 to 30 links to its locations on the web. “One app that can be built, for example, is a targeted search engine for each vertical,” Iskold says. “In fact, Glue API already offers search so all that needs to be done is to put up a search box, get the matching Glue Key, let the user select and then output the links to this object onto a page.” Iskold says that developers also can build applications that mine patterns in its giant network of people and things (for example, people who are interested in this movie are also interested in this book, and so on).

The API is free to be used for up to 5,000 calls per day. For more than that, developers should contact AdaptiveBlue directly to determine how it can address their needs.

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