I’ve always considered toolbars / extensions to be the hardest path to a successful distributed business. A download is a formidable barrier to growth, no matter how much value that download provides. I’ve discussed the challenges of building a toolbar powered business on this blog here and here. For every StumbleUpon, there have been countless Meetros – good ideas, good products, but just not quite enough juice to overcome the download barrier.
But all that being said, Blue Organizer’s new product Glue seems to have a lot going for it. It has a lifeline into the early adopter crowd via investor Fred Wilson. It has a fresh round of funding. In Alex Iskold, it has a well known CEO who is a thought leader in the company’s space of semantic meaning. And last but not least, it has a neat product that is much, MUCH simpler to grasp than their original toolbar.
When I originally reviewed Adaptive Blue’s toolbar it took me about four paragraphs to explain what it did:
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.
With Glue, the essence of the product – extracting semantic meaning from various pages – remains the same, but everything else has been vastly simplified. There’s no more tagging, rating, and describing, and there’s no confusing terminology. And most importantly, there’s no new behavior for consumers.
The premise of Glue is actually pretty simple – as you browse the web and hit pages about things that Glue recognizes (bands, movies, restaurants, celebrities, etc.), the “Glue Bar” slides down and shows you friends and randoms who are also interested in that item, and lets you “heart” (bookmark) the item and add your “two cents” (comment).
For example, when I hit the Ben Kweller page on Last.FM, the Glue bar slides down and shows me one of my Glue friends (Glue Mates?, Glue Buddies?, Glue Crew?) and then a bunch of global results.
The end result of this implicit / explicit experience in which you don’t HAVE to do anything other than browse to get value, but it’s really easy to do just a little more, like heart or comment on an item.
Currently, your saved items, those of your friends, and global recommendations are all aggregated on the Glue Facebook app, which you are cleverly prompted to add upon signup (“why not save time and user your Facebook photo for your profile?”). These summary pages are available through an always on bookmarklet in your browser.
Because of how simple, clean, and unobtrusive the UI is, I expect this toolbar to suck back a lot of content, in addition to the implicit browsing data it pulls back. I would bet the farm that a destination site is in the works, that could end up competing with sites like Yelp and Flixster, and will definitely compete with the new generation of micro review services like Blippr, GoodRec, Thummit, and Ruba. On the implicit side, BuzzBox is a start-up that will probably watch Glue carefully.
The biggest triumph of Glue is its simplicity. The original Adaptive Blue toolbar was way, WAY too geeky – if it takes me four paragraphs to describe your product to Sexy Widget’s geeky readers, your prospects for crossing over to the mainstream are unlikely.
This simplicity masks what surely is some serious heavy lifting – both in the front end grokking of different types of content to extract meaning, and in the backend matching that must be happening for Glue to aggregate comments on an Amazon listing of “Be Kind Rewind” with those from a Flixster listing of the same film.
Glue manages to feel like a real, live, unthreatening social network, but one that just happens to live in your browser. The “now you see it now you don’t” effect for the toolbar is brilliant and works perfectly for a service that only applies to some pages.
My only question for the Adaptive Blue guys is: How do I get my site's content in the queue to be recognized by Glue (aka "the glue queue").
For more on Glue, see AVC and RWW.
