That’s because in order for Glue to be useful, you need multiple people in your Glue network to have stumbled upon or reviewed similar content online, like a book or movie.
Today, Glue is taking a big step in addressing this problem, allowing users to import their Twitter and Facebook contacts, such that any time one of them has viewed similar content to what you’re looking at, you’ll be notified, without having to be following any of them on Glue. For example, if you’re looking at the Netflix page for Slumdog Millionaire and 3 of your friends have either reviewed or read about the movie – on any popular site like IMDB or Amazon – the Glue toolbar will alert you to it.
On top of that, Glue is adding two big new features: conversations and recommendations. As the name suggests, conversations shows you all of the comments about the item you’re looking at, regardless of where those comments were made.
This is Glue’s semantic engine at work – it’s able to determine that a Web page is about Slumdog Millionaire, and then tie all of the data about users who viewed it in the Glue bar. Conversations is now part of that mix, with the ability to track replies and filter by friends-only or all Glue users. This screencast further explains the feature:
Glue’s new recommendations feature works like many a recommendation systems before it, basically telling you what your friends are liking. The difference is that it’s aggregating all of this data semantically, across any number of websites about movies, books, and music. Once again, you can also toggle to see recommendations from the whole Glue community.