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by Scott Frangos

Have you checked the available add-ons for Firefox lately? They’ve reorganized the add-ons site and the new structure itself reflects the trends in social media and internet browsing. There are categories for “Download Management,” “Feeds, News & Blogging,” “Language Support,” and “Social and Communication,” among others. And on the section home page for “Feeds, News, & Blogging,” is a plugin called the “Cluepedia Toolbar.” Clues about what?

Above, Mozilla has reorganized their Firefox Add-ons site with helpful categories for today’s web users. The Cluepedia Toolbar is at top of the screenshot, but there were no clues available for the “Social & Communication” category. That fact, itself, was my first clue.

The company that created the toolbar (Cluepedia Corporation), calls itself “the encyclopedia of clues from crowds.” What clues, we ask again? “Clues consist of people’s opinions about anything and everything, from products to politics and everything in between.” Alright. Might be a new twist with some value for social marketers. Let’s take a look, Sherlock.

Thy Shall, and Thy Shalt Not

I went to the download page and was presented with an interesting agreement, prior to receiving the download. The first part reminded me of the Boy Scouts pledge, rewritten for the age of Web 2.0: “You agree to use our Services responsibly for their intended purpose which is mainly to generate Content which is true, accurate, reliable, relevant, complete, useful, and legal in a manner which is cordial, professional, considerate, and sensitive without resorting to libeling, defaming, insulting, slandering, disparaging, vilifying, offending, abusing, harassing, stalking, or tortuous, invasive, threatening to any third party.” Some lawyer got paid to look up a lot of synonyms for abuse.

So far, though, the agreement text seemed agreeable. Then, I saw this clause: “You will not copy, modify, display, license, distribute, transmit, publish, market, sell, trade, or exploit our Services and its Content without our prior written consent.” Hmmmm. Do you think I should have written a letter, “Dear Cluepedia, I would like to exploit your service for the purpose of making a blog post?” Fat chance. C’mon Cluepedia — sure you have to protect yourself, but maybe your lawyer’s on steroids?

Clupedia is slick, but what’s up?

Well, I downloaded the add-on toolbar anyway, and I’m going to tell you what it does, and my opinion of it — but first I took a look at the official website — Clupedia.com, and confess that while it looks slick… what it’s about I really don’t know. Take a look:

Herrreeeeee’ssssss Cluepedia.com. Huh? Must be something about videos. What’s going on with the mini-skirt lady?

Ok. It did peak my curiosity — I admit it. So, I clicked on the slick flash link for “Products”, then “Features,” and read a couple. I learned that “All clues from all Clupedians from all web sites [are] aggregated at a point of interest.” Hmmmm. There were other interesting notes there, but let’s proceed and actually see what the toolbar does.

Getting a Clue

I restarted my Firefox browser, the toolbar loaded and I discovered — that I was now a member of “Cluegen” — “Clugen is the Clues Generation that is single handedly creating the Collaborative Economy.” So… in addition to a lawyer on steroids, there’s at least one marketing person also pumping it up. But can they carry any weight… or do they just have big marketing muscles?

I went to the toolbar, chose “View Clues”, and a menu popped down… delivering the “beef”, I thought. I chose “Free” (a motivator for me), and a box with two “clues” popped up. Both clues had received 5 stars, so I clicked open the clue for “Education and Reference”, and saw the clue, “When Something Could Take.” What? Sorry, I don’t get that one. The second clue in that category referred me to an adult chat site. There were no links I could click in either clue, and neither seemed related to the site — Clupedia.com. So far, the clues I received had left me clueless.

Next, I navigated away from the Clupedia.com site and jumped to a well-known location — Yahoo.com. Checking the “View Clues” menu, now there were more available clues on more subjects. One on Dick Cheney gave an opinion that he is “effective”, but needs to lighten up. One on “schools” gave an opinion that schools make you smart. None I read seemed even remotely related to Yahoo.com, yet they only show up when I am at that location. Nothing helpful here.

When I navigated to my Gmail box, there was a clue related to Gmail. Ah ha, Watson, we have a connection. But the clue simply told me that Gmail was a good service. We already knew that, Watson.

The Final Clue

Now, maybe I’m missing something (OK… call me clueless), and I do look forward to any examples and different opinions in comments here… but I really don’t see much value to CluePedia and plan to disable the toolbar. First, let me throw out this challenge — show me how clues from Clupedia are anything more than unrelated comments, or boring reviews attached to a specific website, and I’ll send you an anthology of Sherlock Home stories. Sure, they’ve got some good marketing people at Cluepedia (and at least one verbose lawyer), but the bottom line for me is that so far, none of the users seem to have read the part about providing content that is “relevant, complete, and useful.” Final answer? Well… let’s just say that’s my final clue.