Lots of chatter about Adaptive Blue’sGlue this week. I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while, because it does one thing in particular that really resonates at this end.
First, a quick intro. Glue is a new service that continues Adaptive Blue’s quest to bring context to our actions on the web, hence the usual label as a “semantic” service. The following video probably does the best job of describing the new service
In a nutshell, Glue adds a bar to your browser in the context of a particular page for various categories, e.g. books, friendfeed, etc
You can choose to annotate the page, like something, see who else might have seen that, and use those as a launchpad to find other interesting material. That’s all fine and dandy, but not the part that is attractive as such. The part that I really dig is that if you view a book on Amazon, Glue tells you who else has seen it and liked it, but not just on Amazon, but on other sites as well. In other words the focus is on the item that you’re looking at. Assuming that there is an API at some point to access some of that common interest graph, you have a powerful platform to find other interesting material and people.
So rehashing the data finds data, then people find people meme, it would be interesting to have such discovery engines for biological resources. Not necessary to find people who were also interested in a particular paper, gene or pathway (although that’s an interesting idea as well), but also to pull out related material across data sources, just as a function of our browsing behavior, or programmatically and then serve up that information as part of a mashup. Life Science data, IMO, lends itself very well to such treatment, so it would be interesting to see if there would ever be a Glue for bioinformatics. The closest thing I have seen is Gaggle.
Given that Adaptive Blue is a customer, please read this disclaimer
“Glue”ing the web
First, a quick intro. Glue is a new service that continues Adaptive Blue’s quest to bring context to our actions on the web, hence the usual label as a “semantic” service. The following video probably does the best job of describing the new service
Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.
In a nutshell, Glue adds a bar to your browser in the context of a particular page for various categories, e.g. books, friendfeed, etc
You can choose to annotate the page, like something, see who else might have seen that, and use those as a launchpad to find other interesting material. That’s all fine and dandy, but not the part that is attractive as such. The part that I really dig is that if you view a book on Amazon, Glue tells you who else has seen it and liked it, but not just on Amazon, but on other sites as well. In other words the focus is on the item that you’re looking at. Assuming that there is an API at some point to access some of that common interest graph, you have a powerful platform to find other interesting material and people.
So rehashing the data finds data, then people find people meme, it would be interesting to have such discovery engines for biological resources. Not necessary to find people who were also interested in a particular paper, gene or pathway (although that’s an interesting idea as well), but also to pull out related material across data sources, just as a function of our browsing behavior, or programmatically and then serve up that information as part of a mashup. Life Science data, IMO, lends itself very well to such treatment, so it would be interesting to see if there would ever be a Glue for bioinformatics. The closest thing I have seen is Gaggle.
Given that Adaptive Blue is a customer, please read this disclaimer
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