#GoogleGlass: Agile Ecosystem of Technology

My conversations about Google Glass are falling into a pattern: ‘what is it?‘, ‘what does it do?‘, ‘what about *insert name of other technology*‘. The gadgets in our lives are no longer viewed in isolation: we’re interested in the ecosystem and the agility of everything that invades it. The honeymoon period is ever shorter.

iPhones, Fuel Bands, Rifts and Glass, Strava or Shazam, they’re all just part of a world we interact in: a world that we increasingly expect to serve our social needs, not dictate our actions or take a month to master.

‘It’s got 12gb storage‘, i tell a bored audience. Nobody cares. It’s abstract now: the days we used to worry about storage are long gone (in front of me on my desk is a wooden bowl containing those oddities we collect in life: stray keys, some loose change from Asia, the spare button from a shirt and several orphaned memory sticks, 4 or 8 mb. Redundant technology from a bygone age).

I’ve taken to wearing Glass all the time: because to truly explore it’s purpose, to find out how to integrate it into the ecosystem, i need to just use it. I’m making video diaries: sure, i could do it on the phone, but i never used to. I have to explore new behaviours to see how Glass meets those needs.

I’m trying to explore in categories: curation, storytelling, sharing. They’re my primary interests. But i’ll also see what emerges: whilst we are certainly years away from mainstream applications of the technology in organisations, we need to be open to ideas, open to understanding how the era of the smartphone won’t last forever.

My guess? A centralisation of processing power and storage into one device, with other sensors and devices networked off it. In my shoes, on my glasses, on my wrist, in the car, but all integrated and sharing widely. But who knows. It’s early days. The thing we know for sure is that the technology alone will no longer dazzle us: it’s the application that counts.