SOMEWHAT FRANK

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.

Thummit For Mobile Recommendations

Last week I got a chance to attend a dinner and demo night for the new startup called Thummit. Thummit is a new service that looks to offer simple, social and portable recommendations. It is currently focused on the restaurant scene and offers a way to send recommendations via text message or Twitter. You can simply text thumbs up, down or maybe to Thummit and the service does the rest. Thummit can also send restaurant recommendations back to you via text message. If you are trying to make a dining decision between a couple of different restaurants Thummit can help by enabling you to setup a poll among friends and then send it out via text message.

Strands Offers $100K To Best Recommendations Startup

The Strands, a recommendations company with offices in Virginia, has put a little $100,000 prize to the best recommendation startup. What does that mean? The Strands seek to identify the best early stage project in the area of recommendation technologies, considering the technology, business opportunity and team behind the project. The Winner will be offered an investment of $100,000 from Strands. Winners will be awarded at the upcoming ACM Recommender Systems Conference in Switzerland. If you are interested or maybe you can recommend someone - check out the full contest details.

LivingSocial Offers Recommendations Galore

Where do you usually find out about a new book to read, a new song to listen for or even a game to play? I think most of us would say we find new things through our friends and social interactions. LivingSocial, a DC-based startup created by the Ruby on Rails development shop Hungry Machine, is looking to help with similar social recommendations. Started as a Facebook application, LivingSocial offers a handful of vertical recommendation sites (books, food, music, movies, beer, and games). Leveraging the Facebook social graph LivingSocial claims to have 6.4 million beta users, who have collectively reviewed nearly 80 million items since February.

AOL Buys Sphere For Content Recommendations

My first day working at AOL back in the fall of 2006 I had the pleasure of having lunch with Sphere CEO and founder Tony Conrad as he was visiting to start working with the AOL. Since then, Sphere which I covered previously when it launched in May 2006, worked with both AOL News and myAOL Mgnet Recommendations to offer related content recommendations. It is a pleasure to see that AOL has finally acquired Sphere for an undisclosed amount.

Outbrain Launches Content Ratings Widget

Taking a page out the Netflix and Amazon playbook, outbrain, a New York-based startup, officially launched yesterday to offer a ratings and recommendations widget for content. With outbrain bloggers, news, media, magazines, rss readers and other publishers/aggregators can add a rating and personalized content recommendation widget to their blogs and sites easily and free.

Loladex Local Search Based On Your Friends

Finding the best place to eat, get your teeth cleaned, get a haircut or buy groceries in your local neighborhood can sometimes be a daunting task using the Web. While there are some sites like Yelp that lend a helping hand they don't cover everything you might be looking for and they certainly do not have all of your friends recommendations.

Loladex, a Washington, DC based startup, which just officially launched today is looking to offer prioritized search based on recommendations of Facebook friends. Loladex, founded by Laurence Hooper and Dan Goodman both formerly of AOL, is looking to offer true word of mouth by creating a compelling local search engine experience for just about anything in your area.

YTS VideoMap Facebook App Launches

YourTrumanShow, the personal video diaries startup, that launched, VideoMap, a video discovery widget at the DEMO Fall 2007 Conference has now released it to the Facebook world. VideoMap offers users the ability to see who links to them and who they link to as well as the video content they have collected. Users can follow along as a graphically rich visual map tracks the path of discovery, relationships, and content. VideoMaps also leverages YourTrumanShow's recommendation algorithms to help cultivate social interactions.

Online Advertising Estimates, Lifestreaming Tips, 10 Recommendations Engines, Pownce Updates API & Twitter Preps For SXSW

Photo of the Week: This past week I spent some time at the Future of Web Apps in Miami and snapped this shot while a panel of 11 experts tried to come up with an new app in 40 minutes.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.02.2008

LOUD3R Network: Quick News For Enthusiasts

If you are a motorcycle or political enthusiast than listen up because you are going to like this. LOUD3R, a network for niche enthusiast offerings, has launched a couple of different aggregation sites. FAST3R the motorcycle site and VOT3R the political site are pulled together by leveraging a semantic publishing engine used in combination with natural language processing and human intelligence the engine selects and publishes the best and most interesting content to the network. Users can also contribute content and comments to the site.

FeedHub Updates Feed Personalizer

FeedHub, the Pittsburgh-based startup created by mSpoke, has just announced an update aimed at improving the relevancy of its personalized feed creator. I covered FeedHub when they launched back in September 2007, since then they have received a lot of user feedback which they used to plan and execute on this latest update.

Imagini For Last Minute Holiday Gift Ideas

If you have not made a wish list yet your time is growing short but don't fret. Imagini, not mentioned previously in my wish list round-up, might be able to help you both create personal wish lists in a flash as well as help you come up with gift giving ideas for others.

Google Apps Future, Mobile Phone Novelists, Edgeio Shut Down, Zuckerberg's $40m In Stock, MyStrands Funded & 100% Biodiesel Jet

Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Joey Wan while she visited Laguna Beach recently. It had me California dreaming!

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 12.09.07

Tiinker Smart Social News Site

There are a number of social news sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and many others that all leverage social recommendations to power discovery. Tiinker is a social news startup based in Australia that recently launched into private beta that leverages both active and passive user inputs to determine what content should be displayed on the site.

myAOL Intro at the Widget Summit

I spoke a few weeks ago at the Widget Summit in San Francisco on a panel dedicated to discussing the personal homepage space. The session was an hour long discussion with a cast of industry experts. I had a chance to get ahold of a video clip of my introduction. Additional footage will be coming out soon but I wanted to preview this video introducing myAOL to the Widget Summit crowd.