Video: see Get Glue’s demo reel, embedded above.
Summary: Young startup Get Glue is the early steps of how every product and website will be social impacting recommendations and marketing. It ushers us into the early steps of the Era of Social Colonization, the third era of five in the evolution of the social web.
[Get Glue is an early example of the Era of Social Colonization a state when every product, services, and object can have social reviews by people you know]
Last week I spent time with small Get Glue team on a briefing, they were recommended to me from former colleague Charlene Li, so if she suggests something, I’m going to quickly follow up. It’s rare that I would dedicate a blog post to a company from a briefing, but this one is significant.
Get Glue is meta social network, meaning it aggregates the explicit and implicit behaviors of other social networks. Example: If you leave ratings about products on different websites, it will start to aggregate it to one page. What does this mean? It means that Get Glue can aggregate the opinions of your friends about nearly any product.
Early example shows significant impacts to brands
- Early example, yet not maturity: Although this is focused on media, movie, music, gadgets and more, expect it to grow it’s scope to include services, restaurants, and even enterprise products.
- Barriers to mainstream adoption It requires users to use a Firefox plugin to enable, so it’s only reaching a limited number of people and they have to be active in social networks.
- Recommendations will be aggregated: Soon, every product, webpage, and service will be rated by your friends, and the information will easily be aggregated into one location. Silos break down, as Get Glue is pilfering the reviews from thousands of sites to create a unique database with all the social data.
- Significant impacts to marketers: You cannot stop this, and marketing as we know it will have to switch to a focus on social recommendations.
This is an amazing application! Thanks for sharing it with us. How quickly will Chrome and Explorer need to configure to accomodate Get Glue and its (coming soon, I am sure) competitors?
Expect Chrome to roll this feature out by end of year. People overlook them, but in reality, Google is one of the largest social networks –far greater than FB. We should expect the GetGlue folks to development plugins for Chrome, IE, and other browsers.
Also, this is an impact to Flock, who should have developed this feature long ago.
Hi Jeremiah, Adaptive Blue (http://tinyurl.com/pw3q64) is the brainchild of Alex Iskold, and was presented as one of the early examples of semantic web startups. Alex writes very interesting posts on ReadWriteWeb I recommend reading (see his article on the contextual web http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/contextual_web.php ). Similar “semantic” features can be found on OpenCalais (based on Clear Forest, acquired by Reuters), or BlogRovr (acquired last year by BuzzLogic) created by ActiveWeave (which also did Stickis). I love the “meta social network” meme … looks like social browsing (Yoono, …) is past š Regarding meta SoNet, have a look at DiSo or other distributed SoNet.
Thanks Amaury
Yup, Alex is a smart guy, been reading his stuff on RWW (But didn’t make the connection till he told me over the phone)
I saw this app last week, found it through some twitter link someone posted.
I think that, as Bogie said, this may be the beginning of something wonderful. But, it is farther than it seems from there.
Take the example above, how does GetGlue know that a web site, blog (which it was not clear it was tracking) or another site talks about a certain product if the writer uses a different name, a different spelling, or a different way to describe the same?
This is the quintessential Web 3.0 / Semantic Web / Semantic World question that is holding us back across all social networks. We try to use hashtags in twitter to group certain entries (akin to categories in blogs), but what if you misspell the tag? then you are not contributing to what you think you are? And, who dictates the conventions for tags?
I worked on a similar architecture for a customer service solutions some 10-12 years ago, and we were too early to market mostly due to semantics. Same as Web 3.0, or just about anything else that relies on the conversion or natural speech to categorization.
I think there is something there, they may have to spend more time working on those details (maybe they already have, but I have seen no evidence of that yet).
Thanks for pointing it out. I will categorize this (should I add a hashtag?) as Not Ready for Primetime
Esteban
Agreed, early days. They have skills, funding, and smarts to eventually make it ready. I’m with you: to watch, closely.
Esteban,
It is early days but we’re excited by the initial feedback we’re getting on the product. By keeping our initial focus small, we’ve been getting good results.
The technology that powers Glue is indeed a semantic technology. We’re able to identify everyday things (books, movies, music, etc.) across popular sites. The technology recognizes the item and then understands that it’s the same item on page x, y, z and is able to make the intelligent connections.
Hope you check it out and let us know any and all thoughts!
Fraser
Pretty awesome. I was going to say the major flaw was having to create a login for Glue rather than using Facebook connect – but then right after I signed up there it was, import friends and photo from Facebook. Perfect. I’d like to be able to import other networks as well…but this is a great start.
I see the point about semantics but, again, this is a great start and as was mentioned, the semantics issue is broader than this and applies to more than just Get Glue. I’d rather that they come out now and evolve than wait for the perfect technology/solution to that question.
Katie, glad to hear that you’re checking out Glue š
I also agree with your strategy – get the product out now, listen to the feedback, see how usage evolves, etc. rather than waiting and fine tuning.
We’re using semantics to understand objects and make connections across popular sites. The list of supported objects and sites is growing regularly [anything you’d like to see?].
Also, you can sync Glue with your Twitter social graph. We’ve evaluating other solutions too.
Fraser
Fantastic application. I saw a demo at Democamp Boston and thought it had some very long legs. If they can build up their communities, they’re going to have a great run.
Fantastic app and love it (wish the enabling went beyond Firefox though).
With the direction we are taking with sites like Get Glue, I am beginning to wonder if this is beginning of the end for brand marketing departments in organizations. It used to be that firms ‘promoted’ their brands through ads and the like to form a conscious and sub-conscious mental imprint on their audiences. Moving forward, what the brand-marketing does would have less impact on the mental-model that a person has about the organization than the “grade” given by their social-network peers. Also, it would be interesting to see the domino-effect of evaluations — would a “grade” on one product/service cascade and have an exponential effect in terms of positive/negative impact to the whole organization. (We see that today, but aggregation of evaluations across sites makes it a whole lot powerful).
This is why I love following you, J. You have such a keen eye on the future of social media when most of us are trying to make sense of the present. Glue looks amazing- I hope it will really spread and be embraced by the community as well as by marketers.
Wow, pretty fantastic association potential connecting phrases to objects is a great step. Now connecting those objects by verbs and descriptive adjectives/adverbs will be the “afterburner” that will skyrocket semantic computer understanding into the “advertisers dream space” (which I called swimming in riches on a post a while back). Once object association is characterized and stored in databases users won’t have to click much, they’re normal (public) conversations will enable contextual information.
Best of luck to GetGlue’s algorithm development, fascinating field with incredible potential.
Given how powerful ratings and reviews are in swaying a decision (I write about this in my latest book), this ability to bring all reviews together in one place may make this a true killer app. The principle of social validation taken to the nth degree.
I met these guys at our Forrester Cambridge Tweetup in February. Very interesting idea. Downloaded it and checked it out after I met them. Pretty cool, even cooler that you are blogging about it now.
Alexis, it really was a pleasure meeting you at the tweetup. Thanks again for organizing it.
We’ve recently launched a new version of the product based on all of the high quality feedback that we received from early users such as yourself. I encourage you to try out the new version and keep the feedback flowing!
In poor taste Alex Iskold and his Adaptive Blue named their product after ours:
http://GlueNow.com
Weā¢ve been using the name in commerce since 2006 and have been in the top Google results for glueĀ well before Adaptive Blue launched their productāAlex Iskold had to have known we already had a product named Glue. Isnā¢t Google the first place you visit when considering a name?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/soawesomeman/2872486832/
Weā¢ve had many confused users, and itā¢s still a major issue for us. Adaptive Blue should relinquish the name Glue, it would be the right thing to do.
Hi Jeremiah, Adaptive Blue (http://tinyurl.com/pw3q64) is the brainchild of Alex Iskold, and was presented as one of the early examples of semantic web startups. Alex writes very interesting posts on ReadWriteWeb I recommend reading (see his article on the contextual web http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/contextual… ). Similar “semantic” features can be found on OpenCalais (based on Clear Forest, acquired by Reuters), or BlogRovr (acquired last year by BuzzLogic) created by ActiveWeave (which also did Stickis). I love the “meta social network” meme … looks like social browsing (Yoono, …) is past š Regarding meta SoNet, have a look at DiSo or other distributed SoNet.