Twitter Is Testing Out Its Official Google Glass App In The Wild
It's only a matter of time before Twitter releases its own Google Glass app, as Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr dropped the hint that the company was looking into building one during this month's Glass Collective announcement.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Glass had already attracted early apps from the New York Times, Evernote, Gmail and Path, establishing that the device’s appeal depended on recognizable services adapting their products to its interface. Twitter’s reported field test adds a major real-time social network to that initial app roster.
The earlier experiments ranged from established publishing and productivity services to a Duke-developed recognition app, showing that Glass software was being tested both as a mainstream service layer and as a new class of context-aware tool.
First-order effects
- Twitter’s Glass test gives the company a chance to shape how tweets and Twitter interactions work on the device before a public release.
- Google Glass gains another recognizable service alongside the first announced app partners, strengthening its early application lineup.
Second-order effects
- Other social and content services face pressure to decide whether Glass merits a dedicated interface rather than relying on their existing phone or web products.
- Twitter’s test makes the quality of Glass’s app experience more consequential for Google, because prominent services will judge the platform through what they can deliver on it.
Third-order effects
- If major services continue to build for Glass, wearable computing will be defined less by hardware novelty and more by whether established platforms can translate communication and content into glanceable interactions.
- The mix of publisher, productivity, social and experimental recognition apps points toward an early wearable ecosystem in which platform access and interface conventions determine which services become habitual.
The trend: Google Glass is becoming an early test bed for adapting established internet services to wearable, glance-first interfaces.