Stuck on Glue
There's Gdgt for gadgets, Google stalking for general information, but where are your stalkers to go if they want to know what books you like, what topics you ponder, and (ahem) what site you might spend too much time using to tell people what books you like and what topics you ponder? As I found out recently, it's GetGlue (that link will take you to my profile). You can integrate your profile with Twitter and Facebook (though I found out the hard way that if you're not careful, you can tweet some seemingly random stuff, way too frequently); there's a "sticker" / badge reward system to keep you coming back for your pats on the back, and a "Guru" feature that leaves you clamoring to be the annointed expert on your area of choice (or sometimes, not your area of choice. I found out that since I was the first person to write a more-than-a-few-sentences review of the Long Trail in Vermont, GetGlue automatically made me the Guru, even though I hadn't asked. With the topic of Monopoly Pricing, a simple one-sentence post on the topic was enough to qualify me as a Guru. I can assure you I'm a guru on neither of these topics).
In addition to the badge/sticker system, this GetGlue shares even more with Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt Star: you can "check in" to tell people that you're reading a particular book, watching a TV show, pondering a topic, watching a movie, etc. In the vein of Gdgt, there's also a big component where you tell GetGlue what you do or don't like in a particular subject area (for instance, "Topics / Web Apps"). And in addition to "liking" and "disliking" things like TV shows, you can vote on the usefulness of other users' reviews or comments.
One interesting hitch to the auto-Guru feature is that it will only make you a Guru when you "like" a particular item. I "disliked" Google Checkout, wrote a lengthy, fact-based review and history of the service, and then asked Glue to put me up for a manual vote of users to appoint me as a Guru. Then on a lark, sensing it might work, I changed my "dislike" to "like," and bingo: I was the new Guru.
I found GetGlue through the iPhone app, but the web platform is much more robust and gives you a lot more flexibility.
A cute feature is that once you've accumulated 7 stickers, you can order meatspace stickers to be sent to you via mail. I did so. And in the process, gave them my address. And they have a ton of my personal taste info. A marketer's dream. They *did* promise to only use my address to send me the stickers, and I put an identifying variable in the address I provided them, so it'll be very clear if I ever receive mail as a result of having given them my info.
GetGlue is fun. The Suggestion engine, which attempts to tell you what you might like based on what you've already told it, doesn't work very well, and is lightyears from Netflixs', for example. And since there's such a broad array of topics, and since users easily wander from one area to another, rating items, you don't get the "expertise" that you do on a more focused site like Gdgt. But, GetGlue is fun. And that might be enough to keep it churning for quite some time.
My GetGlue home screen:
