New Apps Arrive on Google Glass
Google Glass, the company's Internet-connected glasses, will soon have seven new apps, including breaking news alerts from CNN, fashion features from Elle, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook posts and reminder notes from Evernote.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has spent the past year positioning Glass as a developer canvas rather than a finished product — David Pogue's September 2012 look at Glass and the future of technology framed it as an open question, and by March 2013 third parties like Duke University were already building niche apps such as one that recognizes people by what they wear. What changes with this announcement is who is building: seven mainstream consumer brands — CNN, Elle, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Evernote — are putting their names on the device.
The pickup was unusually broad for a seven-app announcement, with TechCrunch, Forbes, the Telegraph, ZDNet and others all covering it the same week, reflecting how much attention still attaches to anything Glass does. It lands against a backdrop of public skepticism — Tumblr blogs devoted to ridiculing Glass had already emerged by early May — making brand-name buy-in the counterweight Google needs.
First-order effects
- Glass Explorer owners get real utility beyond demos: breaking-news alerts from CNN, fashion features from Elle, social posts from Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, and Evernote reminder notes delivered hands-free.
- For the seven brands, Glass becomes a low-cost experimental distribution surface — presence on the most-watched wearable of 2013 without committing significant product resources.
Second-order effects
- Facebook in particular is spreading across every available screen while its own launcher effort stumbles: its confirmed May 2013 moves — quietly extending Facebook Home support to the Galaxy S4 and HTC One even as Home's Play Store rankings slide — pair naturally with claiming early ground on Glass.
- Rival hardware makers watching mainstream brands accept a face-worn screen face pressure to prove their own devices can attract the same app partners before wearables' app ecosystems consolidate around whoever moved first.
Third-order effects
- If brand adoption keeps outpacing consumer demand, wearables will be judged on third-party app ecosystems rather than hardware specs — a replay of the smartphone platform logic, with Google again courting developers years before a mass market exists.
- The gap between enthusiastic brand participation and active public mockery of the device sets up the industry's core unresolved question for wearables: whether social acceptance, not technology, is the binding constraint.
The trend: Consumer internet brands are racing to plant flags on emerging wearable screens, treating early presence on devices like Glass as cheap optionality ahead of any proven market.