A VC - Latest Comments in Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Jordan Dobson — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:46:02 -0000

Check out the original Glue service. http://GlueNow.com

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Jordan Dobson — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:44:52 -0000

True Fred, however Yahoo's service doesn't do anything similar to what our Glue product does. http://gluenow.com

Not sure why you would want your users to get confused with a pre-existing product. We get emails daily from Glue people. Bad idea.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

fredwilson — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:11:33 -0000

Yahoo also has a service named glue and there are a few others out there. Its not a unique name

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Jordan Dobson of Glue — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:57:22 -0000

Apparently someone didn't do their homework... or just lacks integrity.

There is already a product named Glue since 2006. http://gluenow.com

Sounds like a great product but stealing a product name is not cool.

I realize there isn't much at our site, since we're doing a rebuild, but here's our previous demo video so you can get an idea about what Glue is about.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

David Lifson — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:45:34 -0000

I just noticed my avatar in your screenshot of Ben Kweller's last.fm page. What I like most about Glue is the fact that I actually was listening to Ben Kweller via Rhapsody.com (I don't use last.fm). By aggregating human behavior across walled sites, we can finally take the first steps towards a fully flowing internet ecosystem - we both can benefit from our interest in content regardless of our method of consuming content.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Dan Nimtz — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:37:29 -0000

I haven't installed glue yet, but it sure sounds similar to diigo. Is it?

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Jacob Rios — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:32:59 -0000

I like the idea but I fall in the camp believing the problem with this concept is that fewer and fewer people go to destination sites these days for content. RSS feeds, Google Reader, etc make it so that you can browse the web's information efficiently from one central spot, making the chances of you and your friends hitting the exact same sites increasingly rare. Rather than hope that I come across the same content of my friends who are also interested in that topic, why not push that information to them via Facebook link share, Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious, etc.

I hope you make this work though. I like the concept of this company (SocialBrowse too) but think the evolution of the internet is headed in the other direction (i.e. smart, filtered, consolidation) this is relevant to an individual based on social recommendations, AI, etc.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Jordan Mitchell — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:40:12 -0000

Oh, the irony!! ... that on the same day we shuttered our Others Online toolbar service, which shows you people relevant to the pages you browse to, that Alex and Adaptive Blue announce their Glue product (which is eerily similar in concept)!

Similar to Adaptive Blue (and Me.dium), Others Online has interesting technology on the back end, and we all focused on consumer-oriented products utilizing that technology. Well over a year ago, we used our technology to connect people with each other (social net style) as they browsed the Web. This is what Glue and Me.dium do as well (at a high level).

But we determined early this year, after a spike in user growth (adding thousands and thousands of users in a short time), that there was no way our revenues were going to exceed our costs. The scale of user acquisition was not achievable without spending a massive amount of money -- essentially "buying" users, which I wasn't willing to do. My understanding is that Me.dium is also having a very hard time achieving any meaningful scale.

As a result, we pivoted away from B2C and focused on B2B. And it's working ... we have well-known and successful partners (online publishers and networks), we're currently adding several hundred thousand users per day, earning revenues and have a near-time path to profitability (knock on wood)! By Q1 we expect to be reaching more than 100M unique users per month. Now that's the sorta scale I can work with!

Someone will crack the "social browsing" nut eventually, but it's not going to be us. We sincerely wish Adaptive Blue, Me.dium and all the others the best of luck, and hope they'll stay the course until they reach success.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

bombtune — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:21:31 -0000

Thanks I'll stick to facebook. This is too much.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

lurker92 — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:48:44 -0000

Fail. Firefox Extensions do not port. They are a euphemism for downloaded software.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

sblservices — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:44:57 -0000

Good idea.
I like it.
Thanks for "ADAPTIVE BLUE".

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Ed — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:57:50 -0000

I know it's stating the obvious, but I think the fact that it
plays nice with Twitter and Tumblr is it's best shot of adoption.

As creative types play with this and then blog how easy it is, numbers will increase.
Folks don't want to just bookmark stuff. The suppliers have over reacted
forever trying make the next big (and better and more profitable) Delicious.

Folks want to be HEARD. If I can easily link to a hot post,
then tweet my brilliant tumblr reblog(and *Original thoughts*), then I'm using it!

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Fraser — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:19:22 -0000

Thanks Andy :)

When are you in NYC again? I missed you when you were here the other week because I was neck deep in Glue. Would love to meet you though (I'm working on the appropriate 'gosh, you're tall' line).

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Fraser — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:13:34 -0000

Hi Gonzalo - I'd be curious in hearing why you're only conceptually interested in it. Feel free to respond here or email me, fraser[at]adaptiveblue

Would be valuable for me to hear :)

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

andyswan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:09:13 -0000

I love it. It's just a great second first-step for this company :)

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing Glue.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

lawrence coburn — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:21:14 -0000

Alex and Fraser, you guys did a great job of stripping this down without losing your core product. I think Glue has way more cross over potential than your original toolbar.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

GL — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:16:48 -0000

concept at the B2B level already exists. Check out www.genius.com . Last I heard they were growing their revenues quite nicely.

There was also a NY company that was introducing a consumer offering (for blogs) couple months back.

As far as Glue, looks pretty cool. Nice job!

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

oakmad — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:27:55 -0000

I had similar thoughts and discussed with Fraser. On pages where he good stuff is below the fold its easy to scroll down and totally miss the benefit that the Glue bar provides. I've learned to think about the bar but a couple of display options would nice. I for one always have a ff sidebar open, I would be happy for Glue to use some of that real estate, or appear like Fred's FM music player bar below; of course providing too many UI options is a slippery slope.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Gonzalo Arzuaga — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:45:40 -0000

Me too, I like the idea, but only conceptually. I don't think i'll use it myself BUT as StumbleUpon already showed, there's an interesting market for ideas like that.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Fraser — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:41:35 -0000

Hi Dan - that may be another interesting avenue to explore.

Right now, with this release of Glue, we're focusing on connecting friends around common things that they like. While we may not often be looking at the same thing in real-time as our friends, we generally interact with similar items over time. And, by capturing the interaction across time and different websites, we're able to make that connection.

The real time component is definitely cool, just a different direction from our focus with this release. I've made a note about the suggestion.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Fraser — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:36:29 -0000

We're monitoring feedback on this topic closely -- if anyone else in the AVC community has feedback on this I'd love to hear it.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Guest — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:32:24 -0000

Now imagine instead of looking at who WAS looking at the page, you could see who IS looking at the page. Have a real time conversation.

So you would see "29 friends, 24 Recent People, and 63 Live People". Integrating http://firef.ly/ with Glue. It would be like a Facebook Live Chat, but instead, an Internet/AdaptiveBlue Live Chat. Way more powerful I think.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

Alex — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:31:56 -0000

Hi Bobby,

There are a couple of things about Glue that are focusing on protecting people from spam:

1. There are no destination pages - the profiles are accessible from any page you are on.
2. It is browser based, which automatically means it is more secure
3. Like in Twitter you choose who to follow, so while spammers might be on the page, their are not in your face
and the worst spam would be inappropriate avatar - something that any network would suffer from.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

bobby_d — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:30:21 -0000

Moreover, I can see them adding malicious links in their profile pages for fishing, and cross scripting hijacks.

Re: Glue: A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser

bobby_d — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:24:31 -0000

Uhm... The benefit of facebook's walled garden is that it can easily reduce spam attempts.

I can easily see this service being exploited by spammers to make fake profiles, and staking footprints on heavily trafficked web pages, so their fake profiles appear, for the 'people you don't know' functionality.