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Glue Connects You With Friends On Sites Visited

Conversations are being sparked in a number of places on the Web these days from Twitter to Facebook to blogs. AdaptiveBlue's product called Glue takes a different approach by enabling conversations and sharing on sites that you visit via the browser. Glue is an browser plugin that appears on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought. It brings your social network to the content pages that you visit rather than integrating directly into various web sites.

Glue 4.2 Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

Check out the quick video (above) and GetGlue to try it out if you haven't already as it just launched a new release. The new release contains the following (as described by Glue):

1. Connected Conversations: Glue enables web wide contextual conversations around books, movies, music and other everyday things. Now users can discuss the things they like with their friends regardless of which sites they all visit.
2. Smart Recommendations: Glue automatically aggregates friends activity from across the web so that users can instantly see what books, music, and movies their friends like the most. Simply by using Glue, users implicitly recommend things to their friends and benefit from friends recommendations.
3. Web Wide Top Lists: Glue features web wide top lists of popular books, music, movies and other everyday things. These lists are calculated based on the aggregate weekly activity of all Glue users. The lists reveal what things users are paying attention to as they browse the web.

Also you can connect and spread the Glue love a number of different ways on the Web.

Kirix Strata: Web Browse Your Data

At the heart of just about every web application is a database. Getting at and manipulating that data is often done through SQL statements which involve a level of database understanding. Kirix, a Chicago-based startup, is looking to help change that by exposing your data in a Web browser experience with the launch tomorrow of Strata. Strata is a powerful set of tools that enables anyone to access, browse and manipulate data from a Web browser.

AdaptiveBlue Smart Browsing Experience

AdaptiveBlue, a company founded by Alex Iskold a contributor to Read/Write Web, offers a couple of different ways to create a smarter browsing and personalized experience by connecting users with an array of services.

By leveraging Mozilla's platform AdaptiveBlue has created BlueOrganizer, a Firefox extension that makes it easy to collect, manage, discover and share information matched it to real-world things like movies, wine or electronic gadgets. BlueOrganizer's wide spread utility makes it difficult to pinpoint a concise product category but it does offer users easy access to a number of content-based utilities. BlueOrganizer up by saying it is a bookmarking product that offers service related information based on what you are looking at (both past and present) on the Web. Users can use BlueOrganize to save, rate and organize the sites and items that they like. If you are too lazy to bookmark you can turn on an "Auto BlueMarking" feature that automatically saves pages a user has visited a set number of times. This feature could come in handy but can be turned off by the user if found to be cluttering their saved items.

AdaptiveBlue also offers SmartLinks as a way for publishers to surface links to relevant information. SmartLinks take advantage of affiliate programs to offers publishers a monetization option that is similar to putting sponsored links on a site. In similar way that Sphere's "Sphere It" widget adds related blogosphere content to an article, SmartLinks add value to an article by connecting users with other relevant information about a specific item. My only concern with SmartLinks is the time it would take a publisher to add them to their content, since it currently is a very manual process. AdaptiveBlue might address this in a similar fashion to "Auto BlueMarking" by integrating a simple rules system into existing publishing platform thus removing the extra work which could be considered a barrier of entry.

Finally, AdaptiveBlue offers something called a SmartLinks Badge. Publishers can use the badge to display items that they like and want to share or recommend with their readers. You can configure a SmartLinks Badge here. Of course, you can hook your badge with affiliate programs to potentially generate some revenue from your favorite items.

Bottom-line: AdaptiveBlue offers a couple of different ways of connecting you with relevant information about a particular item via an link on a page, a page badge or a web browser plug-in.

Do You Know Yoono Buzz It?

With the official public beta launch of Yoono Buzz It!, a free social Web clipping and annotation plug-in for FireFox you may want to get to know Yoono. Yoono is a socialized search community featuring a patent-pending recommendation engine. It aggregates bookmarks, RSS feeds and annotations/notes to rank over 70 million links in its database. I got a sneak peak of Buzz It! back in April and wrote about it - you can read more here.

With the public launch this video might help users to better understand the power of the feature rich extension.

 

Yoono Sharing & Suggestion Plugin

Yoono, a user powered suggestion community, will make it easy for its users to make more suggestions via the browser next week when it launches the "Buzz It" plugin. Yoono already offers browsing suggestions as you are visiting various web locations. The new browser applet will enable users to bookmark or clip interesting links, images, videos and photos from any web site and share them with others or publish them to a blog or MySpace page. "Buzz It" items are saved to a user's Buzzlog which can then be made public or kept private.

Yoono currently reports 600,000 users in its community and "Buzz It" offers them an easier way to share and annotate rich-media content right from the browser. For example, the screen-shot above shows clipping a YouTube video. In observing a demo of Yoono "Buzz It" from CEO Pascall Josselin I was impressed by number of features that Yoono offered. I also took note of Yoono's social aspects which could easily turn into a new social network for meeting people with the same clipping and browsing preferences. Yoono a dating site? Not really, but like any social networking site you can befriend new people through your interactions with  the product. As Pascall puts it:

“Yoono is a people aggregator, allowing everyone to capture and share personalized booklets of content along with their views, perspective and highlights...And, not only is It available from any browser, exportable to the PC, or sharable with others through RSS or email, data can also be printed, saved to the desktop, and published across their portfolio of online profiles, blogs, and networks.”

I think that pretty much sums it up as feature-rich Yoono packs a lot of punch. If you give Yoono a try, it is guaranteed to let you know what it does know in the form of recommendations and suggestions.

Stop Motion Style Used In Web 2.0 Video

The stop motion film style is an animation technique made popular by in the original 1933 version of King Kong and claymation classics Gumby and Wallace and Gromit. The technique makes static objects appear to move by making items move very small amounts between individual frames, producing the effect of motion when the film is played back, as in conventional drawn and painted animation.  The one minute video below was described as "web 2.0 stop motion style" on the web 2.0 page of FunMansion.com where I found it posted. I don't agree with the naming or definition of this video as it really doesn't cover anything related to web 2.0 but I do think it is an entertaining piece of video due to its animation style.

Me.dium For Real-time Attention-based Social Networking Interactivity

Me.dium offers an innovative and compelling application that blends real-time web attention-data with instant messenger social networking capabilities.

Similar to MyBlogLog, you can see when others are visiting a particular site you might be visiting, the major difference is that you can see what sites others around the web are visiting too. Me.dium offers social network capabilities allowing users to connect with other Me.dium users you encounter via instant messenger (shown in the left pane of the screen-shot to the left).

Me.dium requires that you download a browser extension or to be able to interact with others. Me.dium incorporates social interactivity which could act as a discovery mechanism. Me.dium also creates a browsing profile for each of its users and then acts as social matchmaker by connecting users with similar browsing profiles. Stowe Boyd made the following comparisons:

"This is very similar to the Eyebees concept that a client of mine was working on years ago, or other similar ideas, like lluna. However, the design of Me.dium -- embedding this navigator in the sidebar -- is truly great."

I first encountered Me.dium at the TechCrunch 8 event (early November 2006) as they demonstrated their latest creation and they have been busy perfecting the experience every since. At first sight I  thought Me.dium offered a unique community feel however I also instantly thought about potential invasion of web browsing privacy. However, I particularly liked the way that Me.dium handles turning on and off the tracking capabilities they refer to as "sharing" thus putting my privacy concerns at ease. The Me.dium Firefox extension places a "sharing" on/off toggle in the upper right corner of the browser (shown to the right).

The latest version was showcased at the most recent 2007 DEMO conference - watch the Me.dium demo here. Or if clicking the demo link is too much work you could just watch below as Kimbal Musk, Me.dium CEO, demos the product on the Scoble Show.

Bottom-line: Me.dium offers users a unique interactive experience while visiting any web site which could lead to discovery of new friends and web sites.

Does Ajax Affect Site Metrics?

A report by Business2blog recently brought to a light a potential negative affect of the use of Ajax. Ajax, the adored and arguably web 2.0 staple technology, which enables sites to not have to reload a page to make slight updates to its contents.

Leveraging Ajax technology has enabled site developers to create very slick user interfaces on the web. These interfaces enable a smooth user experience but limits the number of page loads thus metrics could be somewhat inaccurate when measuring the traffic to a site. Traffic inaccuracies could affect the way advertisers perceive a site and could directly affect the amount of advertising sold.

The jury is still out as to how metric reporting companies handle sites that are using Ajax. I would assume sites with Ajax produce metrics that are light on page views. However, I would love to hear from someone from  comScore, Nielsen/Netratings, Alexa or other large metric reporting companies to verify my assumption.

Pushing Google's Buttons

Google has added a new feature to its infamous Google Toolbar by now allowing users to add their own custom buttons. If you are have a function in mind most likely Google has got a button for it on display in the Google button gallery. Interestingly, there are a few pages of blog toolbar button entries. According to Google the popular buttons currently are:

1. Weather
2. Gmail
3. Dictionary (Google)
4. Mood Ring
5. Google Video

Of course, if you do not see a button you like you could take a crack at coding your own button.

Study Reveals Shift in How We Interact with the Web

A new browser study performed by University of Hamburg researchers found a shift in how we interact with the Web - moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. The report examining navigation by tracking page reloads, web site viewing patterns and screen size dimensions. According to the report:

"With the increase in new windows and use of AJAX, the back button has dropped from over 35% to less than 15% of all page transitions. Overall the trend reflects an increase in interactivity and form submission, with a corresponding 50% drop in the use of the back button for web navigation."

The complete rather lengthy but very interesting report can be found on WebsiteOptimization.com.

YouOS the Web Operating System for You

YouOS is a web operating system with a suite of intriguing online applications built for you. These applications include simple applications like  and complex applications like word processing.The platform is written in JavaScript so you do not need to know multiple languages to contribute your own creations.  YouOS was created by four very well educated individuals  with a goal of creating a scalable, set of tools written in one language among other things.

YouOS offers a number of common applications online through an web browser which includes email, word processing, instant messenger and RSS reader applications. Additionally, simple applications are offered like the Flickr search application which I have shown below.

The common word processing application is shown here and is called YouOS RichTextEditor.

I am just skimming the surface with what YouOS has to offer. The possibilities are endless because you can also create your own applications on the flexible YouOS platform. With YouOS its all about you - so tinker to your heart's content.

For updates on YouOS be sure to check out the YouOS blog.

Firefox 2 dot 0 Is Here

With the release of Firefox 1.5.1 still fresh as the morning dew, Mozilla has released Firefox 2.0 alpha. It is not even a beta product and could be very raw so I have opted to wait to try it out on my own computer. David Chartier did try it out though and found it to be a little bit zippier.

Windows Live Arsenal: Microsoft Is Back!

There is so much talk about Google and its products these days that Microsoft may not be the first company that comes to mind when you think of the online space. However, Microsoft has been quietly building an online arsenal and doing so without accusations of being 'evil.'The name of the budding e-powerhouse is Windows Live. I think that Microsoft is back to whole-heartily compete with Google in the online software space.

If you take a look at this chart (or click on the screen-shot below) of all the products Microsoft has on tap with Windows Live, I think you'd be pretty amazed.

I understand that not every product is able to compete with current widely-used Google online applications, but I think that if Microsoft integrates all the services into existing online applications it will be successful in several of these endeavors. Microsoft is not only competing with Google; they also are positioned to take on eBay, Craigslist and Yahoo among others.

Firefox Browser Pimped With Extensions

Ever wonder what would happen if you added 1o0 of the most popular Firefox extensions to your browser? I did. However I recently found this post on Splasho which took 100 of the most popular Firefox extensions and installed them all at one time. Here is what is would look like (screen-shot below).

Yes, that is a pretty ugly sea of toolbars. How would the browser's stability be affected? According to Splasho:

"Overall I was very impressed. The browser was a little slow on my machine (which doesn’t have impressive specs) but there were no crashes except when installing the extensions."

Wow, that is surprisingly impressive. 

Performancing Firefox Extension Enables Browser Based Blogging

A Firefox extension for Performancing was released by Nick Wilson and his team yesterday (December 20, 2005) according to this post on the Performancing Blog. Performancing is a browser based product that allows you to post to an existing weblog via the browser. This is very similar to a feature that the "social browser" Flock had released however based on some of the comments and posts I have read in the blogosphere it appears that Performancing offers more ease of use then the Flock feature. So basically, you download and install the Firefox extension to your Firefox browser. Next you can configure your existing weblog. Finally, any time you see something on the web while surfing using Firefox you can right click your mouse anywhere within the browser to open a blogging text editor and beginning posting to your blog instantly. I had to update my Firefox browser first before installing the new extension. Also I had to uninstall a few other extensions due to some issues I encountered.

You can download the extension here. Additionally, Steve Rubel and Darren Rowse give their review and perspective on the new extension.