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Alex

Spread the Word: Tell Friends, Grab Widgets and Obsess with Things

by Alex on February 4, 2010 · Comments

Two days ago we announced Special Powers for Gurus including the ability to win movie tickets and copies of new releases from movie studios and book publishers. Today we want to talk about the toolbox for telling people about things you love.

The spirit of Glue is to empower our users, and that is exactly how we approached Spreading the Word. You are getting a creative toolbox for sharing stuff you are into. This toolbox appears in the sidebar on each object page. The first version consists of being able to send things to friends via Email, Twitter, Facebook and, of course, Glue; being able to grab awesome widgets and being able to obsess over things by featuring them on your profile. Lets take a look at how each of these works.

1. Tell Friends

Clicking Tell Friends button brings up an overlay with sharing options. You can customize the default message and select the method of sharing. Twitter and Facebook are checkboxes. If you’d like to email friends, check off Email option and enter the list of comma separated emails. You can send the object to one or more of your Glue subscribers, by selecting entries in the screen below.

2. Grab a Widget

Many of you might not know that Glue has a widget product, used by major book publishers and bloggers on over 30,000 web sites. The neat thing about these widgets is that they let the readers to explore books, movies, music, etc. in context, by providing covert art, description, previews, reviews and cool shortcuts. Today, we are delighted to make these widgets available for every object on GetGlue.com.

When you click Grab widget, up comes an overlay with the cover and 1-line JavaScript. If you are using Blogger or Typepad, you can install simply install by clicking the corresponding button. If you are using Wordpress or another platform or simply a web site, you can just copy and paste JavaScript into the exact spot where you want the widget to appear. Here is what you get (mouse over the cover):

The widgets are 175x - perfect for standard blog sidebar. If you are a techie, you can fiddle with the width option in the script. The widgets are great for promoting individual books, movies, and music releases - authors, book publishers, studios, record labels and marketers - take a note!

3. Obsess with things

The last button in this toolbox is called Feature on Profile, and it lets you stick a banner on top of your profile showing off the very thing you are currently obsessing over. Here is one on my profile:

This is a cool and fun way to tell people what you are into. You can remove or swap the banner any time. Also, other Glue users can grab that banner right from your profile and copy it on their profile.

So there you have it, a toolbox for you to spread the word about things you love - Tell Friends, Grab a Widget and Feature on Profile. Let us know what you think about these and tell us other tools you’d like for us to add.

Also, send us links to the widgets that you grab, we will be building a gallery of all Glue widgets and will include your blog/web site.

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Tags: GetGlue | social marketing

Introducing Guru Special Powers and Giveaways

by Alex on February 2, 2010 · Comments

One of the most powerful aspects of GetGlue is the ability to recognize users who are extremely influential. We call these influencers ‘Gurus.’ The Guru title is awarded to the individual who has the richest level of interaction for the given item, and the positions are exclusive: there can only one Guru per book, movie, album or tv show. To be the Guru, you have to actively participate in the conversation, be helpful and unlock the secrets of the bonus points.

Today, we are excited to launch special powers and rewards for our Gurus.

As a Guru you now can:

REVISE pages:
Can you provide a better image for your item or write a more compelling description?
As the Guru, you are now empowered to edit your pages for the better!

RECOMMEND related items:
Gurus: do you know a book, movie, album, topic or TV show that goes with your item like peanut butter goes with jelly? Leave your mark on GetGlue by making permanent recommendations for your items.

Get REWARDED with free books, movie tickets, music and more:
We have great giveaways lined up from our partners: Universal Pictures, Random House, Harper, Hachette, Macmillan, HMHco, Wiley, Chelsea Green and more!

1. Your Guru items, points and Guru Leaderboard

The number of your Guru points appears in right top box on your profile. Clicking on that box takes you to the page that lists all the items you are Guru of. Here is a sample Guru page for Jenna Marie who is our top Guru this week.

To qualify to be the Guru you need to like, comment and reply on an object. Once you qualify you enter the competition with other users to be the guru of this books, movie, album, etc. The competition is based on points, where you get points for Replying to other users. You also get bonus points for being the first to comment, first to reply in a thread and also for joining new threads. You can see your current number of Guru points in the sidebar on each object page.

We also added new Leaderboard section, showing top Guru’s this week. Here is what it looks like:

2. Revise pages and add recommendations

When you become a guru of a book, a movie or an album Glue grants you a set of special powers. As a guru you can change the cover image and edit the description. You will see the edit links appearing above the image and above the description. Also, as a Guru you can recommend related books, movies, music, topics, etc. to expand Glue recommendations and to benefit community by sharing your tastes.

For example, as a guru of Lost Symbol, I added a bunch of other suggestions, which I thought were relevant. Now, even if I loose the Guruship of this contested book, my recommendations will still appear on the page. So by recommending related items, as a Guru you are able to leave a permanent mark on the object you love.

3. Win FREE Stuff!

In addition to the special powers as of today, Glue Gurus will be eligible to win movie tickets, books and more. We have partnered with Universal Studios, Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Willey and others to bring exciting rewards to our Gurus. Here is how the giveaways work:

When the new release comes out, FREE stuff is available for gurus of related objects. For example, Wolfman Tickets are available to the Gurus of other horror films about vampires and werewolves, books by Stephen King, video games with monsters and also related topics like Silver Bullet on Full moon.

We have dozens of books and movie tickets available immediately. Multiple giveaways will run every weekday and the new winners will be announced daily. Each giveaway will appear on the object page and also on pages of all related objects. If you become a Guru of one of the objects during the giveaway, you will have a chance to win, but you should know that each object can only win.

So there you have it - special powers for Glue Gurus, creating even more reasons for you to engage around your favorite things, to become the influencers and earn rewards. For more questions about Guru and Giveaways, please visit our FAQ.

As always, we look forward to hearing what you think about this!

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Tags: GetGlue | giveaways | gurus

New Glue Actions: Favorites, Save For Later and Not for Me

by Alex on January 19, 2010 · Comments

We’ve been getting a lot of requests from all of you to implement more choices for interacting with things on Glue. Today we are releasing to a set of new features that let you indicate Favorites, Save things for later and also dismiss suggestions that don’t fit your tastes.

1. Favorites

Until today Glue had only two kinds of ratings: Like and Dislike. Now with Favorites you can tag things that you really love. You may Like a lot of things, but Favorites should be things that are really special to you. To mark something as a Favorite select the option from the action pull down. Everything that you mark as a Favorite will appear in your profile under the Favorites tab. Here are my favorites: http://getglue.com/alex/favorites.

2. Save for Later and Not for Me

Many of you asked us to be able to save things that look interesting for later and we are pleased to add this option. Select the Save for Later option from the action pull down and the saved object will show up under the Saved tab on your profile. Right now this tab is private - only you can see things that you saved.

You also asked to be able to dismiss suggestions that you are not interested in. When you mouse over the suggestion, you can click a link called Not for me. This will remove the suggestion and Glue will learn to never suggest this to you again.

All these new actions are available right now on GetGlue.com, so head over and start building up a list of your favorites :)

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Tags: favorites | GetGlue | Suggestions

GetGlue for Firefox Update

by Alex on January 15, 2010 · Comments

We just released GetGlue for Firefox with a few enhancements. Please update your addon.

1. Speed: Main object tips have been tuned to come up instantly. This is very handy as you can quickly get to previews, reviews, ratings and sharing.

2. Notifications: Chicklets on your avatar and status bar tell you if there are new updates from friends or new suggestions.

3. Like/Comment Improvements: You can now Unlike by clicking the LIKE button again. Also, comments can now be up to 1,000 characters. Sorry, Twitter, but people asked us to be slightly more verbose ;)

The updates for Chrome and Internet Explorer will be coming soon.

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Tags: firefox | GetGlue

Introducing GetGlue extension for Google Chrome

by Alex on December 8, 2009 · Comments

chrome logo Google just launched the extension gallery and we are excited to annouce launch of GetGlue extension for Google Chrome.

If you are using this new browser from Google, you can now enjoy seeing your friends around books, music, movies on sites you visit. You can install GetGlue from Chrome extension gallery (note that Mac users don’t have extensions enabled yet).

The version of GetGlue extension for Chrome works the same as the versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer. With GetGlue extension you will be able to:

See your friends comments on popular sites for books, movies, music, and more
Like and comment on things you are interested in and display them on your GetGlue.com profile
Get suggestions for similar books, movies and music and find users with similar tastes
Enjoy music previews, movie trailer, celebrity pictures, rent movies, buy books, and more.

Take it for a spin and please let us know what you think!

And if you want to read more about the Chrome extensions launch, please visit ReadWriteWeb and DownloadSquad articles.

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Tags: chrome | GetGlue | google

Introducing new GetGlue API

by Alex on November 2, 2009 · Comments

Last week we announced the exciting new release of GetGlue.com. Today we are pleased to release the new version of Glue API.

We are excited about the API, particularly because we are getting very strong response from the users on the new launch. In the first 3 days after launch, Glue users rated over 250,000 objects.

We are continuing to get a new rating every 3 seconds, and are now opening up meta data and links to over 3 millions books, music and movies stored in our database.

The API enables developers to read/write all aspects of Glue via REST. It offers access to Glue streams and collections, Social Graph, likes/comments and other actions, as well as ability to tap into AdaptiveBlue’s semantic engine.

Here are the highlights of what you will find under http://api.getglue.com/v2:

Authentication

The API uses token based authentication. The users are required to authorize the application via HTTPS login and after that everything can be done via a token. There are no developer keys, so its easy to get started using your own Glue user id.

Users, Objects and System

All API calls fall under 3 categories: /user, /object and /glue. /user are for accessing user-specific information such as profile, friends and interests per category. The /object API exposes the user activity around objects, exposes to similar objects and gives access to the semantic engine for meta data and links to this object around the web. The system API, located under /glue, enables the developers to fetch supported categories, search for objects and users, as well as fetch the recent stream of Glue activity.

User collections, activities, streams

With user permission, developers can read/write all user information from/to Glue. For example, /user/objects gives access to objects by category. The API also allows developers to submit likes, comments and replies on user behalf. /user/stream provides the access to personalized stream of suggestions and friends activity, while /user/guru gives listing of all things that the user is Guru of right now.

Object activity and semantics

The Glue object API enables developers to fetch the activity around a given object, for example /object/users returns the ordered stream of the user activity around a given object, and /object/replies returns the listing of replies to the given user. The API also enables fetching similar objects via /user/similar.

Another part of the object API lets the developers tap into AdaptiveBlue’s semantic technology and access meta data about millions of objects around the web. /object/get enables query by URL for rich meta information about books, movies, music, etc. from hundreds of popular sites. In addition, the API lets developers fetch links to the given object by calling /object/links and passing in Glue key.

Getting started

The API is free to be used for up to 5,000 calls per day. It is easy to get started, just create a GetGlue.com account and head over to read the documentation at http://getglue.com/api. If you have any questions please email support at getglue.com or visit the Glue developer Google Group.

We are excited to see what you are going to build.

Happy Hacking :)

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Tags: api | GetGlue

Glue Profiled on Information Week’s ReviewCam

by Alex on July 28, 2009 · Comments

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Tags: Glue | information week

Rad On The Web - The Watch List

by Alex on June 23, 2009 · Comments

Glue was covered today on Rad Watch List (check it out, starting minute 7 or so).

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Tags: Glue | rad

Glue Genie: The Game of 8 1/2 Queens

by Alex on June 22, 2009 · Comments

Its a new week and a brand new Glue Genie Game!

Use the clues that Glue Genie hides around the web to solve the puzzles and win books, music and movies. This week, find 8 1/2 queens and win!

The Rules

1. Add Glue to your browser: http://getglue.com and follow @glue_genie on Twitter.
2. Your first clue is the image at the end of this post
3. Find all 8 1/2 Queens and Tweet:
Dear @glue_genie I solved this week’s game of 8 1/2 Queens! http://bit.ly/GenieQueens

P.S. If you get stuck, ask Glue Genie for help, Tweet:
I am stuck! @glue_genie help me get to the next page!

Prizes

We will be giving away books, music and movies associated with all of the 8 1/2 Queens. Everyone who solves the game will participate in the drawing of each prize - so you get many chances to win!

Are you game?

Here is your first clue:

Bonus Game

Want more? After you found all the 8 1/2 queens you are eligible to play the bonus game below. Solve these puzzles and then tweet:

Dear @glue_genie I solved the 8 1/2 Queens bonus game! http://bit.ly/GenieQueens.

But remember you can’t play the bonus game before you solve the regular game.

Bonus Clue 1: Michelle, shift all by 5 except for i, the i shall stay its stand: Sikjwyiyi

Bonus Clue 2: This queen lost her life because her cipher was broken. The book about her was also about an enigma and featured Alice, Bob and Quantum computing.

Bonus Clue 3: This queen tried to dethrone her predecessor in the circus. She asked to kill the lights and had the newsman introduce her as the new queen.

Good luck and have fun!

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Tags: game | Glue Genie

Glue Genie: The Game of Deception And Lies Winners Annouced

by Alex on June 22, 2009 · Comments

New Game: The Game of 8 1/2 Queens starts right now! >>

Hey everyone and thank you for playing the last week’s game! @glue_genie challenged you to find Deception and Lies around the web, to win books, music and movies. Congratulations to the 10 winners who solved all the puzzles and were eligible for this week’s drawing: