Firefox plugin Glue: sacrifice privacy, get social recommendations
Written on 3rd November 2008
1 COMMENT 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In case you haven’t noticed it yet, there’s a recommendation industry emerging which offers its services for “free” in exchange for your privacy. Share your web apps on Wakoopa, see on which site you waste time at 8aweek, and give away your playlist at Last.fm. I use or used all of these services, they’ve proven to be of great value. Yet I don’t have anything anymore that comes close to privacy. For that matter, I might start using Glue as well.
With Glue, you can see what your friends thought of the books, music, movies, wines, restaurants, gadgets, stocks, actors and tv shows you browse along. A toolbar pops up, and by clicking on a friend’s name, you can tell what they thought of it. Here’s a video explaining how Glue works:
Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.
This product by AdaptiveBlue might be of use for people who shop online a lot. As a true web geek, I get most of my friend’s recommendations via Twitter, blogs, or services like Last.fm. But apart from the privacy, it doesn’t hurt me to give Glue a spin as well. The only challenge here, is a familiar one: I’ll have to persuade my friends to start using it as well. If only they wouldn’t use Internet Explorer…
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By Fraser on Nov 3, 2008
Hi Ernst-Jan,
Thanks for the great write up about Glue. We created it as a way to add context to the recommendations that we’re all sharing about our favorite books, movies, music, etc.
Glue’s powered by a semantic technology that connects you and friends around the common object – regardless of the site you visit. So if you visit a movie on IMDB and your friend visits it on Netflix … you’re still connected!
We also realize that people love sharing their recommendations to places where the conversation is taking place – twitter, friedfeed, facebook. Glue allows individuals to automatically share their thoughts back to these places with the click of a button.
Let me know any thoughts that you have!
Fraser
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