Brand marketers trying to figure out how to tap into social influencers online might want to pay attention to an experiment going on at AdaptiveBlue’s GetGlue. Glue is a social browsing assistant that shows ratings and recommendations of movies, books, restaurants, stocks, and other things as you surf the Web (via a browser plug-in). Members who rate and comment the most in any given category are named Gurus. These are the most active, opinionated people on the service.
Glue is going to be rewarding its Gurus with free giveaways for movies and book from promotional partners including Universal, Random House, Hachette, Harcourt, Farrar, Wiley, and Harper Collins. Some of the initial giveaways include free tickets to the movie The Wolfman or free copies of books such as Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget and Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! (as if that needed any more social-media promotion).
The media companies get their movies and books seen by known influencers, who are likely to rate, comment, and talk about the products. And Glue gets a way to reward and encourage active users with free books and movie tickets. → Read More
If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover ten friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both startups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.
Yahoo’s experiment with social search, Yahoo 360 MyWeb, never took off. is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit. It handed search over to Microsoft, but the search experience on the site is poor. → Read More
Semantic web Firefox plug-in provider Adaptive Blue announced today that the company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures. The company’s product, called Blue Organizer, is a tagging and search tool with an incredible array of features and a focus on parsing the semantic meaning of web pages it interacts with. Union Square Ventures is most well known for its funding of Del.icio.us prior to the Yahoo! acquisition. The firm also invested in Feedburner. Blue Organizer rolled out a series of substantial feature upgrades this week as well; I reviewed the previous version of the product here in November. Adaptive Blue is a four person company that was founded one year ago and had been self funded by founder Alex Iskold. The company’s big break came when the Blue Organizer was selected as an official recommendation on the Firefox 2.0 add-ons page. User downloads grew from 20k prior to that listing to 130k in November to 340k today. It’s interesting to see that growth rate has continued since the release of the latest Firefox version. To get a good idea of Blue Organizer’s power, I recommend either trying the browser plug-in out or reading my previous review of it. Below is a screenshot to give you a taste of what it looks like when I was on a web page containing a music review and used Blue Organizer. The product automatically determined that I was reading about music and what search options would be most relevant. It’s very impressive, but my personal use of the web is focused enough on one topic that it’s topic discerning powers and vertical search are less relevant to me than they might be for more casual web users who read online about things like wine and books. → Read More
In the crowded space of social bookmarking, Adaptive Blue’s BlueOrganizer is one of the most innovative services online. That innovation is continuing with today’s release of version 3.0 of the product. BlueOrganizer is a Firefox plug-in for social bookmarking/tagging that emphasizes use of standardized and automatically determined terms of categorization instead of only the terms that a user thinks of to categorize a web page. It’s a smart semantic based tool that syncs with Del.icio.us, offers dazzling contextual search and is already bringing in revenue. The newest version of the product introduces the Blue Menu, a contextual menu of search and tagging options that appears on right-click and is determined on the fly by a semantic analysis of the page you are on. In other words, if I’m on a web page about a movie I can right click and the Blue Menu will offer to let me search for that movie’s title, for its stars and director and for movies in the same genre in movie related databases. It will let me compare prices for the movie in shopping search engines and with one click I can send that movie to my Netflix queue. If I’m on a page about a wine and right click, the Blue Menu will offer to let me search for wines by winery, type of wine, geographic location and ingredients in other sites about wine. A music item can be launched in Pandora. Blue Organizer recognizes items from a list of other verticals too including travel, toys, anime, software, hardware, restaurants, music, images and video. It’s an impressive tool. Each vertical has some default search options, but users can easily select other ones or make requests for still other databases to be included. In future versions of the software there will be a wizard that will let users easily add new search options themselves. Adaptive Blue has already programmed against hundreds of popular sites in these verticals, but the tool is also quite good at determining context of new sites. With reasonable accuracy, for example, I can highlight the title of a movie in a news story on a news site about that movie and the Blue Menu will recognize it as a movie. It will also let me search for other movies the director has directed or the stars have starred in even if those names are not listed in the news article. → Read More
