Distributed Social Media – Adaptive Blue

 

Widgets and browsers, browsers and widgets. Both represent means for a service to go beyond the boundaries of its domain and become distributed.

StumbleUpon has been very successful in riding its browser extension to a large user base. Services like YouTube and Quizilla have been able to get big distribution for their content by way of widgets. A few days ago, MikeD from OthersOnline explained to Sexy Widget readers how inputs from the toolbar and the widgets combine to properly tag your OthersOnline profile. 

Adaptive Blue is also trying to build a service in which its widgets and its browser extension work together. Rather than treat widgets and toolbar extensions as different features with different functions, Adaptive Blue pairs a browser extension (input) with widgets (output) to create a superior browsing and sharing experience. 

Before getting into how Adaptive Blue’s widget works, it makes sense to first spend a little time on what Adaptive Blue is trying to do as a company. To better understand what Adaptive Blue does, take a look at how Union Square Ventures' Brad Burnham describes the features offered by Amazon: 

“When you are looking at a movie on Amazon, they can show you every movie by that director. They can show you movies that are in the same genre. They can even show you movies that have nothing in common with the movie you are looking at except that people who liked that movie also liked these other movies, a surprisingly useful trick called collaborative filtering. Amazon can do a bunch of other things that make your life easier on the web because they know you.”

The other reason that Amazon can provide this functionality is because they control the environment. They set the rules for how the database is structured, and how things are tagged.

Adaptive Blue is trying to offer this same richness of browsing experience, but on a distributed basis across domains, not just for movies, and without control of the environment. In other words, they are trying to pull semantic meaning out of the existing structure of web pages, while also giving their users the tools to build out Meta data for the best pages and products on the Web.

So here’s how the service works. Once you’ve downloaded the browser extension, right-clicking on any page will pull up a menu of actionable links. For example, right clicking on the “Shawshank Redemption” page of IMDB gives me a Blue Menu that shows me where to find more info, where to buy the movie, where to rent it, movies by the same director, actor pages, etc.

 

The other important piece of Adaptive Blue is the bookmarking functionality. As you find Web pages, or books, or movies, or wine, or blogs that interest you, you can “Blue Mark” the page. Adaptive Blue seems to do a very good job of figuring out if you’re trying to save a page, a blog, a book, a movie, etc, and providing you with the appropriate form. Saving an item gives you the option of rating, tagging, and describing the thing you saved.

So how do the widgets tie into this? They’re the sharing component. As you save and tag items, you can share this information via a widget called a Blue Badge. You can check out my Blue Badge in the right sidebar, with a list of my blog Blue Marks. There are also mini widgets that you can build called Blue Links that display a link to the saved page with the service’s related link resources built in. 

It’s important to note that this service is entirely distributed. There are no Adaptive Blue profiles, and there is no social network lurking behind the scenes as there is on StumbleUpon.  If you’re going to share what you find, it’s going to be through widgets on your sites. Adaptive Blue is not under the same pressure as widget dependent distributed services to tie things back to a home base, primarily because they can monetize in the browser via affiliate links. From a business model perspective, this is a big deal. 

Despite how neat this service is, the obstacles facing Adaptive Blue are significant. It’s not the easiest concept in the world to grasp. There’s a download involved. It’s a new way of surfing the web, and a new behavior for consumers to learn. All the new terminology (BlueLinks, BlueOrganizer, BlueBadge) gets a little confusing. 

To be successful, Adaptive Blue is going to need to drive downloads. The downloads provide the user experience and provide the tools for each user to add Meta data that, in the aggregate, will make the service even better. The reason that Adaptive Blue’s widget is such an important piece of this equation is that it lets Adaptive Blue’s user base push the downloads. The complexity and uniqueness of this service are such that its value is going to be difficult to communicate in a short sound byte, whether it’s through a distribution partner or via an advertisement. My sense is that Adaptive Blue is going to have to follow a Tivo type adoption curve where a fanatical user base of early adopters spreads the good word. How will they spread the good word? Through the Blue Badge widgets.

For more on Adaptive Blue, see A VC, the Union Square Ventures Blog, and TechCrunch.

 

 

 

Comments

[Alex Iskold]

Thanks for such in-depth review! Indeed share-anywhere is the core part of our strategy. Widgets and BlueLinks play well into this and you will be see more in the upcoming 3.3 release.

Alex

[lawrence]

Thanks Alex, looking forward to seeing the next release.