When Alex started talking about his vision for Glue a common theme was the ability to enable the discovery of things through people and people through things. The Connector and Curious George stickers reward and highlight these activities.
Connector
The connector sticker is a nice pat on the back for having a collection of things in your Glue profile that people find interesting.
The sticker text states: “You have impeccable taste! Lots of people are discovering things through your collection.”
This sticker has levels. What’s the highest you’ve seen on Glue? Tip: build up your profile and then share it with others to level-up.
Curious George
Curious George is rewarded to those on Glue who are curious little monkeys.
By exploring profiles - specifically profiles for people you aren’t currently subscribed to - your curiosity is rewarded with this sticker.
This sticker also has levels. What’s your current level?
These two stickers are in my top 5 list - both from the design perspective and how they’re earned. Hopefully you like them as well.
Working across hundreds of popular sites about movies, books, music, and more, the new version of Glue for IE provides in context suggestions, friend reviews, clips and a way to quickly build a taste profile to get better suggestions.
In Context Suggestions
When you visit books or movies, music or tv shows, Glue appears automatically on the page to show other items that you may enjoy.
Friend Reviews
Glue appears to show you filtered reviews from friends, regardless of the website visited. If you visit a movie on Netflix you can see friend reviews even if they were left on Wikipedia or Amazon.
Clips
Glue for IE now includes the new GetGlue.com tooltips. When looking at an item, Glue for IE makes useful info across the web accessible from the current page. Watch movie trailers, listen to songs, access Amazon reviews, browse inside the books - and more!
Taste Profile
As you browse popular sites, click the LIKE button to personalize your GetGlue.com profile. You’ll get personalized suggestions and a central place to access your saved items.
Glue is about sharing tastes about everyday things across a number of categories. The category stickers are fun to collect and reward activity. More importantly, the category stickers quickly signal your interests to Glue users. For example, these stickers tell us that Dan loves movies but Deborah loves books.
Category stickers are earned based on the number of likes within a category or group of categories. There are levels for these achievements: 10, 50, 100, 250, 1000, and 2500.
There are 6 category stickers:
Book Worm (books)
Radio Head (artists + albums)
Couch Potato (tv shows)
Movie Buff (movies + movie stars)
Geek (gadgets + games)
Foodie (restaurants + wine)
The Explorer sticker is a compliment to the category stickers. It’s earned by having a like across all of the categories.
There you have it - Category and Explorer stickers. Happy hunting! We’ve seen a few 1000 category stickers but are still searching for the first 2500 one. Will it be you?
Aside: there has been some chatter about a Sticker List. Patience my young Padawans. As we mentioned in the intial post, we will be introducing all stickers via the blog.
There has been a lot of buzzabout stickers since the GetGlue.com launch. This is fantastic and we’re glad that people are enjoying the dynamic of stickers in Glue.
Within Glue stickers are fun and special. As you do certain things on GetGlue.com and via the Glue add-on you will earn stickers that help revealyour personality, highlight your tastes and reward your activity in Glue.
There are basic stickers, the kind that reward simple activity and are easy to get. There are also advanced stickers, which take time to earn and reward bigger achievements (some have yet to be discovered!).
We’re going to use the blog to tell you more about stickers and introduce you to new ones as time goes by. Subscribe today and ensure that you stay up-to-date!
The Bootcamp Sticker
The Bootcamp sticker rewards people for doing the training required to become familiar with, and get the most from, Glue.
“How do we add Glue to our site?” has become a common question from publishers, media companies, authors and bloggers.
Current partners who have added Glue to their site include: The Huffington Post, Random House, The NY Times, O’Reilly Media, various Hearst properties, Unbridled Books, hundreds of best-selling authors like Tyler Cowan, and thousands of blogs such as AVC.
This post identifies the various options for implementing Glue on a website (examples are at the end of the post).
Despite the type of integration, the benefits to the site owner are consistent - increases to user experience, affiliate sales, and time-on-site.
(1) Book Widgets: this implementation is ideal for authors, publishers, and sites looking to promote and sell more books via their site. Email support AT getglue.com for your free Book Widget.
(2) Personalized Widgets: add your personal Amazon Wishlist, Last.fm Top Artist list, or Netflix Queue to your site by grabbing a personalized widget from our Widget Gallery with 2 clicks.
(3) Glue for Links: Glue will appear automatically when you link to books, movies, and music on hundreds of popular sites after you add Glue for Links with a single click.
(4) AB Meta: Have the Glue bar appear on your book, movie and music pages by adding AB Meta to your meta headers.
Today we are pleased to announce the launch of GetGlue.com, a social recommendation network for movies, books, music, and other everyday things.
There are four major parts to the release: personalized suggestion streams, GetGlue profiles, Stickers and Guru, and an update to the Glue browser add-on. Here’s a 60 second introduction to GetGlue.com:
(1) Personalized Suggestion Stream:
Once logged-in, the GetGlue.com homepage becomes a continuous stream of suggestions. The suggestions are based on personal tastes, friend favorites, and what’s popular with everyone. As Glue users interact with movies, books and music on GetGlue.com and hundreds of popular sites across the web, the stream updates with fresh, personalized suggestions.
(2) GetGlue Profiles:
GetGlue profiles are the easiest way for individuals to collect and share the movies, books, and music that they like. When looking at another user’s profile, common interests are quickly seen and it’s straight forward to discover new things through them.
(3) Stickers and Guru:
Users are rewarded with a variety of stickers for their efforts and achievements on Glue. It’s also possible to be recognized as the Guru of specific books, movies and music. There can only be one Guru per item, so users will have to work for the honor.
(4) Updated Browser Add-on:
The new Glue add-on appears on hundreds of popular sites about movies, books, music, and more. The add-on appears to provide in context suggestions, friend reviews, clips, and a way to quickly build a taste profile to get better suggestions.
Get Glue and Find Your Next Favorite Thing.
We hope you find this release as exciting as we do! Thank you to everyone in the Glue community for your insight and support, we couldn’t have built this without your guidance.
Please sign-up for your account and start personalizing your suggestions at www.getglue.com. We look forward to your feedback on the new GetGlue.com!
Suggestion Stream
Profile
Stickers
Glue Add-on
Here’s some press covering this announcement:
Techcrunch: “GetGlue has the power to create a stream of personalized recommendations around social products, such as movies, books and music.”
Mashable: “The suggestion engine aspect of the site now really adds a lot of value — especially if you are frequently looking for cool things.”
The Next Web: “If you have been using Glue, this is going to be a major treat, so get over there, and get some tips on what you will like, that you have not discovered yet.”
CNET: “Today, Glue is adding a more traditional profile-based system to the site, which provides more incentives for users to contribute regularly.”
ReadWriteWeb: “The result is friendly competition, increased interactions, and a very sticky website that’s compelling and entertaining for even the least technical end user.”
Lifehacker: “Glue packs in quite a few features on top of just suggesting new things, including movie previews and integration with popular sites like Amazon.com and Last.fm”
We’re pleased to announce that as of today new Glue tooltips are integrated into all of our widgets across the web.
More than 30,000 Glue widgets are live on more than 10,000 blog and major publishing partner sites, including Random House, NY Times, Hearst properties, O’Reilly Media, and hundreds of bestselling authors from all major book publishers.
The new tooltips expand the Glue network and increase user experience, conversion, and time-on-site for our partners.
The main tab of the tooltip is complimented by category specific secondary tabs. For example, book tooltips provide a way to browse inside of the book, links to purchase the book, and in-place Amazon reviews. Movie tooltips provide an in-place trailer, Rotten Tomatos summary and links to purchase or rent the movie.
We’re thrilled to bring the tooltips to our widgets and provide you with a better experience as you browse the web. If you’re interested in widgets for your site please contact us at support AT getglue DOT com.
As you enjoy Glue, we’re working hard to make it even better. Don’t get jealous, but we’re already testing the new version! I thought I would share a sneak peak at the new bar!
The bar is much smaller (60% of the previous size). There is my new favorite feature - the big thumbs down. The Yellow and Blue outlines are gone, and have been replaced with clear thumbs-up and comment icons. It’s now easy to see how many people and friends like the item - this was an often requested feature.
On the right-hand side of the new Glue bar (not visible in the image) are items that are similar to what you’re looking at and an easy way to see suggestions. This is still a work in progress and our designer Jason has already changed a few details.
The tooltips currently live on GetGlue will be included in the new Glue bar. How cool is that? The tooltips automatically bring relevant info to you. If you’re on Netflix or Wikipedia you’ll able to see the movie’s trailer. You can also read reviews, buy it, see images, and so on.
Update: Here’s a screenshot that shows the new search functionality. Enter the name of an item and easily access the object’s page on Glue - showing you friend reviews, links to the best on the web, and similar items for the object.
We are hoping to release the new Glue very soon, but if you can’t wait, and are interested in beta testing, just leave your Glue username below!
Last week we discussed the web-wide dataset that Glue’s amassing. To highlight the richness of the data, we revealed that Netflix activity makes up less than 15% of all movie data on Glue.
In this post we’ll share some data from music activity on Glue. Based on the responses to the question we posed on Twitter, this data will be surprising.
Glue’s web-wide music coverage is fairly broad. Appearing on more than 50 popular music sites, Glue’s coverage ranges from A (5 different sites) to Z (Zune).
When Glue activity for each music site is plotted (left), the result is a power law curve.
The five most popular music sites on Glue dominate the others, accounting for 85% of the activity. The remaining 15% of music activity on Glue is spread across more than 50 sites.
The 5 Most Popular Music Sites
In order, the most popular music sites are Wikipedia, Myspace, Amazon, Last.fm and eMusic.
Accounting for 50 % of all music activity on Glue, it was surprising to us - and those who answered our question - that Wikipedia and Myspace are the prominent sites for music fans on the web.
In an informal poll, Glue-rs provided the following reasons for visiting these sites: (i) Wikipedia: completeness of information - info, albums, song lists; (ii) Myspace: access to media - songs, pictures, video.
While this may be true, we believe that the prominence of these two sites in Google search results contributes significantly to their high activity levels. For various artist searches, the artist’s homepage, Wikipedia, and Myspace are consistently the top three results (see: Rihanna, Counting Crows, Lady Gaga, Metallica).
Conclusions
Spread across more than 50 popular music sites, Glue’s music coverage is web-wide. The dataset is rich and growing daily, capturing popularity and trend information. While we turn to a small handful of sites for the majority of our music info, there’s a healthy distribution of activity across a long, flat tail.
I am a huge fan of SeamlessWeb and am so excited that it is now Glue-d!
For those of you who don’t know what Seamlessweb is, it is a simple way to order food online. Seamless takes away all the worry of ordering food over the phone. Loud restaurants, not having cash, and so on, they aren’t issues.
Now, my experience on Seamless has gotten even better with the addition of Glue! You don’t often talk to friends about where to order lunch, but now that Glue is on SeamlessWeb I can see my friends opinions on these types of places.
To celebrate this integration we ordered lunch today on Seamless from Noodle Bar!
Connector
Curious George
The Bootcamp Sticker
