Glass apps will require people to create new content filters. Maybe that’s just a losing battle.
Glass office hours at Google I/O this week. Will these desks one day be as common as the Apple genius bar?
The Elle app will feed information to Glass wearers’
timelines, including horoscopes, select headlines and fashion photos.
Elle’s owner Hearst Corp. sees it as a test trial for many other media
brands it owns.
I admittedly already had a headache when I tried on
Glass to demo the app, what with all the jostling to make the packed
sessions on Glass and trying to snag a bit of the 1,800 pounds of free
snacks that came straight from the Googleplex (and yes, Valleywag,
also a $1,300 Chromebook Pixel—with full intent to return once my
colleague tries it out). But after five minutes trying to navigate the
Glass app, I immediately left to down two Advils. I’m not even sure what
the horoscope said. Glass tried to read it to me outloud, but the noise
level in the conference hall was too loud to hear much at all.
The headache, the noise. It’s the same problem I see
with some of these early apps, really with the entire idea that anyone
will want to consume information on Glass that is any small degree away
from useful in the moment. Navigation directions when you’re lost are
useful, and actually provide value in front of my face. Maybe, maybe, a shopping list when I’m at the grocery store, as one might pull up with Evernote’s new Glassware, as the apps are called.
But do I want to see New York Times news alerts near my field of vision? Or random Tweets,
even from my very closest, most curated connections? What about
Facebook timeline updates? Um, probably not, and certainly not all
together. If I do, I promise, my phone or maybe even a future smartwatch
are short glance away.
Both Google and the media and Web companies producing
these apps are clearly emphasizing that content in the Glass timeline
must be more finely curated and immediately useful than on a phone.
Using the CNN Glass app,
for example, one can set the time of day headlines are sent and
preferences for the kinds of updates received. But people aren’t good at
being their own filters, and anyone who uses Glass will have to be
given that app options will only grow from here. My own filter is filled
with gaping holes carved out by best intentions. On my phone and in my
desktop news feed, there are endless streams of content I hope to read
and 99 percent ignore. On Glass, ignoring will be an even bigger and
more overwhelming management task.
At a session on Glass for developers, Google’s Timothy Jordan
talked in depth about the special considerations for Glass apps. He
noted the timeline of “cards” that apps feed to a Glass wearer are
inherently ephemeral. A Glass user won’t likely scroll back more than a
few cards, and so the timeline inherently “decays,” he said. That’s why
he advises app creators not to include a “Delete” option on their card
notifications. Because it is unnecessary.
Glass has potentially amazing and potentially foreboding features (see “Treading Carefully, Google Encourages Developers to Hack Glass”).
And perhaps mags like Elle could one day help people identify the
dresses in a store and store it on a shopping list, for example.
But the real value of Glass will not be in how people
interact with what’s already on the web. That will just give everyone a
big headache.
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