With Glue, AdaptiveBlue frees us from the tyranny of the site
I am not going to write another review. I would, however, recommend that you give Glue a try, and congratulate the AdaptiveBlue team on closing a $4.5million Series B round that sees existing investors Union Square Ventures increase their contribution and welcomes RRE Ventures.
For me Glue is a compelling example of putting semantic technologies to work in ways that quietly help the user to enjoy a more compelling experience, without getting in the way.
There are plenty of offerings that will put you in touch with your social network on a single site. Glue is interesting because it escapes the tyranny of the site and connects people to things across a growing number of sites. My interactions with Social Networks and the Semantic Web on Amazon.com are visible to members of my network who prefer to shop with Barnes&Noble, and those who are amongst the 32 owners of this book hanging out on LibraryThing. My personal preferences are respected, as I only need to interact with the item on a site of my choosing. Members of my network gain the 'benefit' of that interaction without needing to change their habits and visit sites of my choosing. Behind the scenes, semantic technologies are hard at work reconciling the 0387710000 with the 978-0387710006, the 4561465 and the various other ways in which we choose to refer to a single body of intellectual expression. When a match is found, the Glue Firefox plugin does a nice job of subtly highlighting the fact... without getting in the way of whatever task you are trying to complete.
It's nicely done, but the pool of sites that the back-end technology understands is still (relatively) small... and pretty dominated by US stores. Clearly AdaptiveBlue have a lot of work to do in order to grow the number of sites on which the plugin is activated. The company's AB Meta format will presumably be one part of a concerted push to devolve that work out to site owners themselves, although there must surely be opportunities to capitalise upon the work over at Yahoo! around SearchMonkey. Could Glue re-use some of that structure, some day soon?
Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold is a member of the Semantic Web Gang, which I chair