Get Glue, the service that lets you comment, like and earn stickers on nearly any kind of media, launched their iPhone app just now. Probably the most interesting feature of the app is that it allows you to “check-in” to whatever media you are enjoying, whether reading a book, watching a movie or listening to music.
Here are the main features of the app:
- Check-in to your favorite shows, movies, music, books and more
- Share check-ins with your Twitter and Facebook friends
- See what your friends are currently watching, reading or listening to
- Earn points, get stickers from GetGlue and major brands, and win free stuff
- Rate lists of popular shows, movies, music and books
- Get weekly new releases and old favorites picked just for you
- Access existing reviews, clips and ratings for > 20M movies, books and albums
- Take your favorite entertainment and suggestions with you everywhere
Media partners for the app include Showtime, Warner Bros, Random House, Universal Pictures, PBS, Wired, Simon & Schuster, Cinematical, Hachette, Harper, Indiebound and O’Reilly.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
Through the app, Get Glue also offers branded stickers like the ones below:
Just like other check-in apps, you receive points for checking in and can also earn special stickers for check-ins. This feature, however, does not include a physical location. Get Glue said that they wanted to focus on the action of checking into a piece of media and sharing that, and that they didn’t feel that the geolocation of the user was important – we have to say that we disagree on this point. First of all, adding a geo tag, while a bit of extra work, isn’t extremely hard. Second, in many instances, we can see how this info – matched with what media the user is checking into – could be very interesting and useful.
For example, say a couple of your friends check-in that they are watching the same DVD – might they not be watching it together? If you’re interested in joining in, you would then know where they are if there is a physical location, i.e. “Bob’s crib”. You might be able to figure this out from customized Twitter or Facebook messages, but as Foursquare and other services have shown, this isn’t as precise as geocoded place. There would have to be privacy restrictions, etc, but that is true for all location services. At any rate, from our conversation with Get Glue, it doesn’t seem as this will be a focus, at least in the near future, which to us is too bad, but still perfectly understandable.
Get Glue said that the fact that there app is coming out the same day as the iPhone 4 goes on sale is coincidence (though obviously it can’t hurt) and that the app wasn’t built to take any specific advantage of iOS 4 capabilities such as multitasking. Their future upcoming plans for mobile include a major update to this app, an iPad app and and an Android app.
Note: Get Glue previously released an iPhone app a few years ago, but quickly abandoned it, and their service has changed dramatically since then, so for all intents and purposes, this is their first real iPhone app according to them.
Here’s a demo of the app:
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.