Snowcrashing

Getting Glued To The Power Of A Contextual Web

Posted on 14. Jun, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Uncategorized

Want to share your favorite music, movies, books, or clubs and restaurants with your friends? Sure you can do so by hopping from one social network to the other: from Last.fm to Goodreads to Flixster the options are really infinite.

Or you can get yourself some Glue. Launched late last year, Glue is a browser plugin that connects your web life to that of your friends while you are surfing the web.

How does it work?

Basically, you browse the web as you would do normally. When you visit pages that include information about movies, music, books, artists, restaurants and alike, Glue slides down in the form of a bar and shows previous reviews from friends of yours and recent visitors.  You can also add your 2cents or like the item you’re visiting.

Additional features include the option of importing your Twitter and Facebook friends and installing Glue as an app on your Iphone.

It’s damn simple and powerful. It’s the recommendations you need and when you need them: in one word a contextual web.

And now it’s also an API for developers. The company describes the API release as, “tapping into Glue’s databases and semantic recognition engine enabling fun & useful applications about people and things.”  In the words of Allen Stern,  you can use the API to get popular lists, lookup user lists, create data streams, send info into Glue and access user profiles.

Why am I excited about Glue?

-Reputation: if you’re an “opinion leader”, you can extend your influence outside your own domain, showing your “followers” what your preferences are in terms of music, movies, books, etc.  Glue lets you build your own “persona” across the web adding credibility and power to your presence.

-A Semantic Less Pushy Google:  So far marketers have been stuck to the old SEM tactics. Glue offers the perfect personalized, contextual upsell tool. You could build your own Glue as you do with Facebook Pages and everytime a user visits a page related to your product you could show up. Say you’re a band, you could build your Glue in a smart way so that it shows up for all related music/bands searches. It would take only a small effort, but I’m sure it would be completely worth it! Most likely, Glue has something in the works and will offer some type of paid sponsorship/business account options at some point, but for now it is totally free.

-CRM: thanks to Glue, you can create smarter clusters of your users and God knows, a better CRM is needed!

True, Glue is still small and to be succesfull it needs a larger user base. I am hopefull that it will soon reach a tipping point and pave the way for similar smart uses of the web.

Tags: Contextual Web, Glue, Marketing, Web 3.0