The latest semantic technology from AdaptiveBlue is called SmartLinks. Many of you have already tried them and some even posted them on your blogs and social network profiles. In this post, we will do deep dive on why we introduced SmartLinks as well as look at how they work.
The idea behind SmartLinks
Regular links point to pages. SmartLinks point to things.
The idea that a web link is really a link to an object like a book, a movie, a wine, a gadget or a travel destination is rather simple. Many pages on the web are about things. For example, this page on Amazon is the page about final book in the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Now when you are looking at a book, there are several things that you might want to do:
- Find this book on your favorite book site
- Read reviews about this book
- Find more books by the same author
- Find similar books
- Add this book to your book collection or wishlist
Each SmartLink packs a set of these actions as shortcuts. The shortcuts are contextual, so they differ depending on the kind of object your are interacting with.
For example, a movie SmartLink would include Add to Netflix shortcut, a destination SmartLink would have Map on Google link and a music SmartLink would let you Create Pandora Station.
Each SmartLink helps you get to the information faster.
It does this by leveraging the context, an “understanding” of what kind of thing is being pointed to. This is simple, yet powerful value that semantics and context are bringing to our web experience - saving time.
The Types of SmartLinks
There are three kinds of SmartLinks that you can create today - a basic SmartLink, a SmartLink List or a SmartLink Grid. Each type is oriented toward a different use case. The basic SmartLink is great for blog posts became it can be embedded inside the paragraph. For example:
“J.K. Rowling’s book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is much more entertaining to me than Mike Newell’s movie adaptation.”
The SmartLink List is designed for the blog sidebar. It shows a thumbnail in addition to the SmartLinks launcher and the actual link. The links are arranged as a list and render an RSS feed:
The SmartLink Grid, which we just announced last week, is similar to a list, except, as the name suggests, it arranged the links into a grid. This layout is great for web pages and social network profiles. We also have plans to use it more in the future in the pages on AdaptiveBlue.com:
Creating SmartLinks Using BlueOrganizer
Currently, SmartLinks can be created using BlueOrganizer, but in the future you will be able to create them using our SmartLinks Web Service as well. To create the basic SmartLink you need to navigate to a page that you want and select Create SmartLink from the BlueOrganizer Toolbar Menu. More details on creating an individual SmartLink can be found in this help entry.
To create a list or a grid of links, you need to first save the BlueMarks that you want to publish. After you saved them, you can create the list or the grid by clicking BlueOrganizer Options and then selecting the Share BlueMarks. More details on creating an individual SmartLink can be found in this help entry.
The SmartLinks Technology
The actual link in any SmartLink works exactly the same as a regular link. Clicking through it, takes you to the page that was used to create the SmartLink as described below. Clicking the launcher icon of the SmartLink, and in case of a list and grid SmartLinks, the thumbnail, brings up a glass pane with the set of contextual shortcuts. Unlike BlueOrganizer, which is a Firefox extension, SmartLinks work in any browser.
SmartLinks are powered by BlueMarks that you store. When you BlueMark any page using BlueOrganizer, the semantic representation of this page whether its a book, a movie, a blog, a travel destination or just a regular web page, gets stored on Amazon S3. We talked about the format of BlueMarks last week. SmartLinks are created by running the stored BlueMark through a template. There is a template for each type of SmartLink - a book template, a movie template, a blog template, a travel destination template and a template for a regular web page. Here is the diagram that illustrates how this works:
How SmartLinks Power a Smarter Web
SmartLinks add semantics to the most basic unit of the web - the link
Because we know what sort of thing the link points to, we can offer a set of basic shortcuts to the relevant actions and destinations. This simple extension of the link shows the power of context and semantics. If more links on the web were like SmartLinks, we’d all spend less time clicking. And that would be great.
