I wore Glass a lot during my vacation time in Oregon, Washington, and Nevada these past two weeks, and i quickly discovered that Glass was another conduit for random stranger interaction.  There were quite a few people who recognized what it was and were very “fanboy” regarding the device, and there were others who may not have recognized it but were curious enough about it that they would come up to me and ask me what it was all about.  Wearing Glass made me more approachable – and while the resultant interaction had much more to do with me and Glass than the strangers i was interacting with, it was still pretty neat to see their reactions to seeing it and trying it on.

As a result, i’ve decided to start creating a blog series that document the more interesting of these Random Glass Encounters, something that hopefully over time will evolve and refine itself as a means of sharing great stories about strangers and about humanity.  The interaction I had with a street worker on Fremont Street is what inspired this idea, so it feels appropriate to start with him.

These two guys were working Fremont Street in Las Vegas, walking up to passersby to convince people to go into the Plaza Casino.  The guy in frame was about to hand me the pamphlet and probably give his marketing schpeal, but as soon as he saw that i was wearing Glass, all thoughts of his job went out of his head and he immediately asked very enthusiastically, “Is that Google Glass??”

One of the Glass Explorers forum topics that i see on our little elitist discussion forum is the question “What do you do if someone wants to try it on?”  I haven’t read through that because i’m sure that opinions are pretty polarized.  I know that people are probably fairly wary of someone running off with a device that they sunk $1500 into, there’s also potential issue of privacy for all of the data on the device, etc.

For me, one of the reasons i got the device in the first place was to share it.  The likelihood that someone is going to run off with the device feels pretty low probability, and the reward of giving someone the unique experience of wearing it far outweighs that low risk.  In fact, i’ve found that in some cases i have to take a fairly aggressive approach regarding sharing the device – most of the people who approached me asked questions about it, but didn’t ask if they could try it on, probably because they’re afraid to ask or assume that i would say no, so I’m the one that has had to say, “do you want to try it?” and help them put it on.  Almost everyone has had that “opening up Christmas presents” look on their face when given that opportunity.

I remember very clearly that when I asked this guy if he wanted to try it, his eyes got wide and he asked, “are you sure?” and i said of course, no big deal, and helped him put it on.

He was immediately enamored with the device – it was clear that he was pretty fanboy about it and knew about it generally (he knew that it was in limited beta, he knew i had to pay $1500 to get it), but he didn’t know a lot about the specifics of what it actually did and how it worked.  So i walked him through the basic functionality of taking pictures and video as well as the other features of the device.  I discovered fairly early that Glass can pick up my voice commands even if someone else is wearing it, so I did an “okay glass, take a picture” while he was wearing it to get another of what people have been terming “selfies,” and the reaction on face when he realized that i was giving it voice commands to take a picture was priceless.  I did the “okay glass, record a video,” and ended up taking a 13 second video while he had it on:

The other guy knew about the device too and asked a couple of questions but was otherwise pretty sideline about the whole thing.  After another minute or so of talking, mainly speculating about what the price of the device was going to be when it went public, they both walked off.  He never did hand me a pamphlet or even tell me which casino he was promoting – i had to look at the picture afterwards to figure it out.

I wish i had gotten his contact information so i could have forwarded the pics with him wearing it.  I’m sure he’s told his friends about it, likely posted something on facebook or google plus about it, and knowing that Glass created that sort of personal story for him makes me pretty happy.

So the response i’ve given most often to answer the inevitable “what do you think about Glass?” question, is “it’s interesting.”  Google Glass is interesting.

My appointment for Glass was for 11:00, but Jenni had a yoga class that she wanted to go to one block away that she needed to register for at 10:15.  I arrived at the appointment at about 10:30 to see if it was an issue for me to get there early.  There were people outside the office milling about, one had Glass on her head, but the others didn’t.  I walked up to them and got assigned to a guy named Pat who was wearing a very non-descript gray shirt (that everyone else i think was wearing also) who introduced himself and took me to the Glass area after giving me a guest pass.  Before he got me through the paces of picking out my Glass and set up, he walked me over to a very quaint food/drink set up – small plates of snacks, as well as tea, water, soda, and beer options.  The whole thing was strangely ceremonial but in a common way.  Nothing negative, but it had a tinge of “not quite rightness” to it that i couldn’t quite place.  It wasn’t terribly important, so i let it pass.

All of the Glass units were set up in a display – five different possible colors.  I had picked out a color online, but i had the opportunity to change my mind, which i did – online i picked up one that was more grey, but when i put that on my head, i didn’t like how that color went with my hair color at all.  The other options were white, light blue, black, and orange (the official brand names of those colors are different, like “sky” and “charcoal”, but i forget the names of the other two).  I didn’t like the orange or the grey, i liked the other three well enough, but i decided that the black looked the most subtle – as subtle as a cyborg-looking tech thing on my face could possibly be.  After picking that out, he sat me down at a table and we started going through the unopening and the set up of Glass.  The unboxing was interesting too, another one of those ceremonial things.  He passed the box to me but otherwise didn’t touch it which made me realize that  i forgot that there are people that make a big deal out of an initial unboxing of a product.

So i unboxed it.  I was very into the branding and the overall packaging.  it fits my minimalist sort of aesthetic, something i’m fine with despite the fact that that’s pretty trendy.  The box contained Glass, the charging cable which is a nice high quality flat-cord style USB to miniUSB cable, a small documentation pamphlet that was a duplicate of the FAQ that i read online, and an extra set of nose pads. Towards the end of the appointment, he also went over the accessories bag which contained a sunglasses attachment (that looked pretty good when i put it on), a clear “i’m pretending i’m wearing glasses” attachment (that looked really ugly when i put that on), and a strange microfiber carrying bag that contained a hardshell case on the bottom that you stick Glass in for extra protection.

He ran me through the basic Glass functionality, and i asked some very detail-oriented function questions. I think he was impressed with the level of detail of the questions that i was asking, but i could be fooling myself. Doing the set up i also talked about how i think i’m going to potentially use it – in the context of the marching band, and in the context of other potential creative musical/visual installation performance pieces of some sort way down the line. because of some of the ideas i had, he pointed me to the developers site figuring i could have an interest in making my own apps and/or thingys using the Glass API (which i am, but i do not have time for until mid-to-late 2014 at the earliest). I noticed that he was very precise and careful about the kind of vocabulary he used when talking about Glass – consistent language when it came to the color definitions, consistent language when it came to the user experience wording, and talking about “use cases” for Glass, a term i haven’t heard ever since i left my corporate job. I asked him flat out about it and confirmed that everyone who was a part of the Glass team was trained in how they were supposed to talk about it, making sure that they used a consistent language.

There were a few questions that he couldn’t answer because he was basically the equivalent of a first-level support person – kind of like what i was at Symantec. Some of the questions i asked him were things like, “how does the video do with white balance and brightness change if you move in and out of different lighting conditions?”, “once this gets released to the public, what does having the explorer version of this product do for me if anything?”

Overall the appointment took an hour and a half. It was pretty low frills, but very casual and friendly. I got connected with the Glass Explorers community page which i haven’t gone and explored fully yet, but will probably spend regular time looking through to see how people are using it.  I gathered all of my stuff, he took me out of the building, and i waited for Jenni to get out of her yoga class.

In other words, how do i choose to use facebook differently than google plus? What would make me write a blog entry on my domain blog vs. my livejournal? What constitutes a twitter status over a fb status or a g+ stream post? Some of these questions can be answered, but some of them cannot, and it’s the ones that cannot that i feel i need to focus on and refine.

With my two blogs, i deliberately separate what content i choose to put where. My livejournal blog is about my life and my friends and thoughts of a more personal nature, whereas this wordpress blog is my more public face with content bent towards thoughts of a more long-winded and cerebral nature. I call this wordpress blog my thoughts blog. I call my LJ my life blog. Even though there is sometimes a degree of blur, i think it’s pretty clear to myself and to my audience what content belongs where.

It’s this sort of distinction that i feel like i need to have between facebook and google plus. Like my two blogs, i feel like the purpose and audience of those are very similar, and therefore the uniqueness of them comes entirely from the content that i choose to write. despite the fact that one *could* use fb in the same way as g+, doing so arbitrarily is problematic because of the audience i’m trying to reach. I want my friends on fb to get something different than those who subscribe to my g+ feed. To have a heavy degree of duplication or even similarity in style between those two feels wrong; someone would likely only subscribe to one or the other, or those that subscribe to both wouldn’t get much different out of one versus the other, and that’s not what i want.

Despite the recent changes facebook has made that has seemed to alienate some people, facebook still holds my largest audience and thus it acts as my “hub” for most of my other social media, meaning that i import some of my tweets to fb, i post links from select blog entries here and LJ to fb, and i post links from my youtube page to fb. But i don’t want to use facebook as a hub for google plus. Google plus needs to stand out on its own in the same way that my blogs stand out on their own.

But how should that happen? I don’t really want fb or google plus to have the same professional vs. personal distinction that my blogs do. And despite my desire to not have a heavy degree of duplication between fb and g+, the fact is that what i choose to share of myself on the internet doesn’t have much content variance other than that.

So maybe this is an opportunity to change that. g+’s Circles has a great deal of flexibility as it relates to selective sharing, so it’s possible that i could write things of a more personal nature if i structure it in a way that i trust. Or maybe this is an opportunity to ween myself off of any direct relationship to fb and use it merely as a conduit, because the new changes that fb rolled out have some advantages, but they also a direction change for that platform that enhances everything about fb that i dislike.

That last statement warrants some expansion. There are two aspects of the new fb changes that bother me the most.

First is the upper right news ticker. That news ticker doesn’t seem like a huge change, but i have to hand it to fb: it’s absolute genius.

Tickers are one of the big reasons why i never watch rolling news channels and why i can have issues watching sports channels. When you first get introduced to the idea of a ticker, it seems like a big distraction, but the more you watch the channel, the more you get used to it and incorporate it into your understanding of how that channel works. I don’t watch sports obsessively, but i watch enough of it that that i don’t notice the bottom ticker unless i want to. I don’t watch news channels ever, so those tickers are a constant source of flash and distraction, but if i were to watch the channel more often, i know that i would absorb and become accustomed to it. And once you get used to the ticker being there and what it represents, the ticker’s purpose has been maximized: to provide another avenue of constant change of information that’s designed to keep you watching.

The internet in general hasn’t really used the ticker paradigm for much; the NFL uses a variant of it on their website with big neon flashing signs whenever there’s a score change or a big play during a game that you’re not tracking or watching. But now, fb is changing that game, using that ticker formula in a way that will try to keep people logged on that much more often because they can and will always look at it for change of information whether they want to or not. And sure, most people hate it now, but give it some time for people to get used to it, and before you know it, it will seem Normal, and that constantly shifting and changing ticker of useless information will help make fb an even bigger time suck than it already is.

Secondly, fb has added a higher degree of customizability to how people view their feeds, and normally as a guy who is all about data and loves having the ability to be versatile with it, the way in which fb has incorporated this flexibility is counter to how i want to use fb.

fb is a dominant part of our culture. i don’t think that it’s inherently bad or good; like any tool or piece of technology, how bad or good it is is dependent upon how it’s used.

My use of fb as both a poster and a viewer is deliberately designed to be all surface – as a poster, fb acts as a good conduit for me to contact people and to get some basic interaction with those people. What fb does *not* serve as is a place where i want to have any real meaningful interaction. It is not a platform for my political views, it is not a place where i want to divulge the real personal details of the person that i truly am, and it is not a place where i am going to put important details about anything going on in my life in a way that assumes that people who are close to me are going to read it.

As a viewer, i want to see on my news feed a slice of what has happened the most recently with whoever has happened to post. i don’t assume that my friends that post important information on fb expect me to get that information only from fb; if i catch it, awesome, but if i don’t, then it’s not a big loss because i would assume that the people closest to me would tell me important things outside of that fb context.

And this is where the customizability of the new fb becomes useless to me, because all of the customizability assumes that i want to control that information in a way that takes fb much more seriously than it should be taken. “i care the most about seeing feed items from these important people in my life, so i’m going to tailor my fb feed to see their stuff the most.” But the amount of time that it would take for me to micromanage and microcontrol fb’s settings to make it do what i want is simply not worth it. To customize it properly would take constant adjustment – more time spent on fb – just so that i can make fb more appealing to me – and thus spend even more time there than i currently do.

It’s food for thought. We’ll see what happens in the next month or so as fb and g+ and their respective userbase evolves, and as i start to refine my thoughts about how the fb shift and my use of both platforms could potentially change. i know i’m not going to delete my fb, but it may be that it becomes just my virtual business card – an easy way for people to reach me if they don’t have my current info – and not much else.

i’m not sure if word branding has a more technical term to it, but when i use it, i’m talking about one of two things. The first use has to do with how a brand can become powerful enough that the company word or name can replace the common name. Back in the day, Sony came out with the portable tape player called the “Walkman” and it had a strong enough brand presence that “walkman” became synonymous with the portable tape player, which is similar to the brand presence of the iPod becoming pretty synonymous with “portable MP3 player”. The brand has such an overwhelming presence that a decent portion of the consumer market doesn’t even consider that there might be portable mp3 players out there other than the iPod.

Using the term “google” for internet search is another great example of this. People don’t “internet search” anymore, they “google.” Common use of that automatically undercuts any other search engine that currently still exists. I imagine that half of the internet users now never even heard of altavista.

The power of that first use of word branding is pretty clear. There’s a second use that’s etched itself into my brain lately (and is the main point of this entry): the branding of a common word so strongly that it creates an association with a company. Whether or not this form of branding is successful or not is still rolling about in my head.

Way back in the early days of livejournal and before the likes of facespace and mybook (um), there ended up being a debate about LJ’s use of the word “friend”, and it was a big enough deal that LJ almost came up with a different term to describe people whose LJs were connected to each other. The issue was that a school of LJ users objected to the use of the word ‘friend’ for LJs that they were following and followed them because they felt that just because they were connecting with someone’s LJ that didn’t necessarily mean that they were actually friends with that person. Calling someone on LJ their ‘friend’ when they didn’t feel like they were actually ‘friends’ could potentially create an awkward social situation. There was also a concern that if two people who were actually ‘friends’ but one didn’t want to share their ‘friends only’ LJ with the other, that it could also create social awkwardness. “How can you call me your friend in real life if i’m not your friend on LJ?” and other similar nonsense.

LJ decided to hold on to the concept of “friend” and that years later became pretty moot as facebook became more popular and used the term “friend” in an even more reinterpreted fashion than LJ did. This is what i mean by “branding a common word” – the word “friend” has a different definition when put in the context of LJ and a further different definition when put in the context of fb, and on the internet, use of the word “friend” can potentially create an association with those websites in itself.

The second and much stronger example of this is the use of the word “like”. when fb first rolled out the “like” concept, it applied mainly to status updates, but it wasn’t too long before anything facebook was “like”able: status updates, shared links, comments left by other people on statuses or photos, &c. It became such a hit that they changed their “become a fan!” concept to “liking”, and it had such an influence that other websites started linking fb “liking” to their website or creating their own version of “liking” for their own website. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon you’ll be able to “like” best hits on a google search.

It’s clear that “liking” in that context is a strong brand with our current fb dominant generation. The question is whether or not creating that brand around the common word “like” is more successful than creating a custom brand that’s fb specific. On the one hand, i feel that branding the word “like” is unsuccessful because no matter how trendy and associative it can be, it’s still so much of a common word outside of the context of fb that it doesn’t create that association all of the time. when you’re in normal conversation and you say the word “like”, it doesn’t necessarily create an association with fb, whereas if you’re in normal conversation and you say “google”, the company and the web engine search immediately pops into mind. (i’m sure that the number one followed by one hundred zeros is misspelled “google” all of the time now.)
On the other hand, filter down to even a broad context of “the internet” and talk about “liking” something and that concept can be immediately associated with fb as the trend setter.

(as a tangent: for me, i’ve never *cough* liked “liking” on fb. it’s something that i will never do except in the case of what used to be “becoming a fan” because it doesn’t fit in my personality to “like” something rather than leave a comment. “liking’ something creates a level of interactive conformity that i already have issue with regarding facebook, and it’s more important for me to take the effort to actually say something, even if it’s just “awesome” and make it my own than to click on a button and have it potentially classified as just one in a throng of what someone else has done.)

Now, fb has rolled out something new: “Questions”. It’s a fascinating feature to me mainly because i feel like there are already so many forums for asking questions outside of the context of fb, but that’s beside the point. The question *cough* that springs to mind has more to do with the brand of it. Why call it “questions”? Why not give it a stronger fb identity? Even something like “AskFB” or even “FB?” with a custom logo using the fb blue and the fb “f” could create a stronger brand and eventually dominate in the same way that “google” or “xerox” does.

as i type this out, a new speculation comes to mind, particularly with this rollout, that maybe the lack of customized branding is a very strict and deliberate company choice. If that’s true, that’s fascinating and kind of funny because if philosophically fb is opposed to the idea of custom branding for whatever reason (off the top of my head it could be to try to keep things simple for all ages of users, but whatever), then it’s possible and maybe even probable that the concept of “like” becoming a common-word brand wasn’t a part of the fb strategy, it was just a side-effect.

Which probably says a lot about how much fb is dominating our culture, but that’s a separate topic.