Google unveiled its completely redesigned Google Maps product on the web at I/O 2013, and at a panel dedicated to the new Maps experience, Maps User Experience Design Lead Jonah Jones and Engineering Director for Maps on the web Yatin Chawathe took us through what went into creating Maps and the engineering effort behind the considerable change seems prodigious.

Specifically, Jones and Chawathe took us much deeper into two of the main driving concepts behind the redesign of Maps, including “Building A Map For Every Place” and “Explore The World.” The former has to do with customizing maps every time a user clicks on a new location, in real-time and with more contextually relevant information, and the latter involves providing beautiful imagery including via Earth integration directly into maps, and with 3D virtual photo tours.

A Map For Every Place

In making a Maps product that is extremely adaptive to both a user’s personal input sources and to specific locales, Google had to rethink its approach to maps, and it looked to the way we casually share directions as a marker of a good system for surfacing relevant information. When you draw a map on a napkin, you are automatically filtering out the most important information, and doing it with your specific audience in mind. The result is a simplified map, that involves maybe a few major routes, as well as smaller roads, and a prioritization that doesn’t necessarily reflect how important a road is to the general population.

“A map draw for you is great because it highlights aspects and things personal to you,” Jones explained, adding that there’s also nostalgic value in something like a hand drawn map. Google wanted to be able to replicate both of these, and so it took an engineering approach to automate a process that’s normally human-powered.

Google didn’t want to exactly replicate the hand-drawn map, however, since it leaves out a lot of information that you want to still be present in a modern, digital, interactive map. But it did want to subtly highlight and downplay certain map elements, bring to the fore aspects that are useful and fading back others that aren’t as important. To do that, it took a big data analytics approach.

First, for a specific location the new Maps algorithm will analyze the entire set of people looking for directions in that area, and then highlight the routes that come up most often. Then from that subset they’ll focus in even further and weigh more vs. less important routes, based again on aggregated user data. They can see which roads are more popular, and then pop those out vs. the less important ones. Finally the less important ones are cut away, and you’re left with something resembling the hand-written map.

Once those are flagged, however, you could still be missing info on the ground regarding very small routes important to a specific place. Those are then targeted via a hyper local re-labeling algorithm that addresses just the immediate surroundings, adding labels to key routes and taking them away from other locations to decrease clutter and subtly change the focus.

That then informs the UI rendering of the Map itself, which still retains the street markers for all surrounding routes. Lines along routes important to getting there are made bold and lines on less important streets are thinned out, but not removed in case some users still require that information. It’s about drawing attention and changing perspective, not eliminating something altogether.

All of the above takes advantage of the immense processing power in Google’s data center to do the whole thing in real-time every single second, for every single one of Map’ millions of users. Yet the impact on a user’s computing requirements is minimal; Google sends even less data than it did with the previous version of Maps, keeping bandwidth requirements low.

Explore The World

Google’s other big addition to the new Maps experience has to do with bringing beautiful imagery to the web, in the form of both Google Earth 3D flyovers and the new virtual tours that provide an up-close-and-personal view of some prime spots. Those virtual tours also represent a massive engineering effort, one which Chawathe explained in broad strokes on stage.

The virtual tours are a crowdsourced effort, which users may not even realize they’re actively contributing to. The images are drawn from pictures uploaded to Google+, Panoramio and other sources within the Google photo sharing ecosystem.

To get from that group of photos to an actual 3D tour requires a lot more than just aggregating photos, however. Google says it can map not only where every photo in its database was taken, but can also tie each individual pixel in every image to a very specific location using its algorithm, making it much easier to stitch sets together. Once that process is complete, it’s left with a point cloud that can flesh out a region, but that’s a brute force approach, and some art is required to make it look good.

That involves filtering the photos, picking ones that show the landmark in context with its surroundings, ones that show the landmark clearly from visually pleasing angles, pics that capture architectural detail, interesting picturesque scenes in various lighting conditions and more. It picks these photos based on visual recognition tech and their popularity and ratings on Google properties; so an image that gets a lot of +1s on Google+ will be rated over one that’s got none, for example.

Once it has a set of top-quality pictures, it determines an order in which they should appear that makes the most sense. Even then it wouldn’t be smooth as a finished product, however, since there gaps and the transition between angles would involve a lot of bizarre warping and image artifacts that would taint the overall experience. So finally, Google’s algorithm goes back to the larger set of images and picks ones that fit nicely in the gaps. These don’t need to be the best quality, since they’re just filling out the animation.

Jones said that what they’ve built is impressive, but still pales in comparison to what a human artist could achieve manually stitching together their own photo tour. He hopes to bring up Google’s automated process to the point where it’s impressive regardless of the source, and comparable with what humans are capable of working on their own.

In response to a question from the audience, Chawathe also said that Google could in the future look for a way to make its 3D guided tour feature a consumer tool. It sounds like it’s not something Google is currently developing, but putting that power in the hands of Google+ users for instance might make it more of a draw for photography enthusiasts. Google already showed that it’s making efforts in that direction with the new auto-enhance and auto-awesome features it introduced for G+ at I/O.

The World In Your Browser Changes As Fast As The Real One Does

These efforts show how Google is making use of its immense computer processing power to deliver experiences via Maps that reflect a continually changing world. It sounds like this is just the beginning for both of the projects, too, and as with every major change, we’ll probably see more refinement of these approaches as users come on board and provide more feedback.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google+ is getting a big update for its photos experience, which is rolling out to users now. Initial impressions show a work flow that makes it easier to tweak pictures quickly and even automatically, without requiring that you learn a huge amount about Photoshop or other editing software.

It’s something that’s designed to be mostly a non-destructive, light-touch product by default, just tweaking things like vignetting, skin smoothing and color balance to make elements pop. If you do a lot of volume image editing, bringing in lots of photos and essentially running the same few tweaks on each, this could be a simple way to replace that with something better, especially since Google+ allows for full resolution uploads to its cloud-based image locker service.

I’m so far pretty impressed with the Google+ image tweaking experience, particularly the Motion feature that stitches together images taken in quick succession to make GIFs. If you’ve ever dug into creating your own shareable GIFs, you probably know that it’s not as straightforward as it appears to be. Motion takes the hassle out of that, deliverying on a very specific need that could help fuel the next generation of BuzzFeed writers and Redditors.

For Google, bringing an improved photos experience to Google+ is a way for it to compete with other social networks like Facebook and their media-focused add-ons like Instagram. It’s also going to be trouble for startups like Shoebox that are also looking into cloud photo organization and management. Will it help the social network from Google become more social? We’ll see.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Using Google Maps today is great for what it’s supposed to do, get you from point A to point B. But there’s a lot of information that Google collects that you never get a chance to glance it, or don’t have a reason to. Google wants to give you more reasons to explore a map, and it’s obvious with the preview of its latest version. This truly is a re-imagination from the ground up, and exactly what the recent leaks tipped off.

I sat down with Jonah Jones, Lead Designer, Google Maps and Bernhard Seefeld, Director of Product Management, Google Maps to discuss the thoughts behind the revamp, one that’s being rolled out in preview mode today — seemingly because it’s such a drastic departure from what’s available now. The main element of navigation is now the map itself, rather than the search box and left-hand information that we’re used to. Once again, it’s taking cues from the mobile versions of Maps, running smooth and fluidly and providing the information that you need within the context of the map itself, rather than take your focus away with search results along the side.

Jones explained me: “What if you could create a billion maps, one for each user. That’s what we’re doing here.” What this means is that Google Maps will now adapt to the things that interest you, including restaurants you’ve been to, ones that you might like and what your friends have done. The brilliant imagery that Google Maps has at its disposal is being pushed to the forefront, running along the bottom of the page. Until now, you had to click buttons to look at some of these images, now it’s all integrated. Google Earth is even making its desktop debut, thanks to WebGL.

Here’s a look at your main navigation screen for Maps on the web:

In case you’ve forgotten, this is how Google Maps looks today:

The extra white space and sidebar navigation in all of Google’s products are getting completely wiped out, thankfully.

A new map, over and over

As you click around the map, drilling into specific areas, the screen is redrawn to adapt to your personal interests and tastes. This approach makes all of Google’s previous offerings seem static. When you click on a point of interest, like a restaurant, you’re doing so from the map itself, and a Google Now style card pops up on the left-hand side with user and Zagat ratings, reviews from your friends and quick entry points to photos of the venue from Street View, both inside and outside of the venue:

Jones noted subtle changes on the map as you interact with it over time: “The map has gone from being this anonymous blank slate to one that I’ve started coloring in myself, because it has become my map. When you go and rate places, it makes them friendlier, they become more prominent with the new design. Places now show up as personal landmarks. Some icons have a yellow glow, and these are places being recommended, for example.”

Here’s what he’s talking about:

There are now over 100M “Places” on Google Maps, with more being added every second.

“The map gets more useful, the more you use it.”

New direction(s)

The way that directions are laid out on the map has been changed, as well. No longer do you have to click on one driving route over another to see the differences, they’re now all laid out on the map at once for you:

Here’s a neat trick, too: If you want to go from point A to point B and don’t have the exact addresses, you can simply click on the map to plot it out on the fly. This is something that I’ve wanted to do on any decent mapping product for quite a while, since dense cities like San Francisco are easy enough to navigate if you know the general direction in which you want to go.

Speaking of dense cities, public transportation has gotten a new treatment with this redesign, as well. Not only does everything look better, but you’re actually given more information to make decisions in the future. For example, if you’re looking up a Caltrain route, you’ll be able to dig in deeper to see the times throughout the week so that you have an idea of how to plan out your day. The quick information that comes up in the Card is just as handy:

Finally, flights have been integrated into Google Maps. This has probably been one of the requests that I’ve heard the most for the product. It makes complete sense that if you’re sitting on a map and are able to put in two locations, like airports, that you should get flight information back…especially since Google already provides this data within its Search product. Well, it’s here now:

It’s absurd to try and figure out why this hasn’t been available to us until now, especially since Google has been leaving money on the table with the sponsored links and results for buying flights.

Visuals

The nice, but not necessarily most-used part of Google Maps is its imagery. You can essentially “visit” a place that you’ve never been before with Street View photos, outdoors and indoors. Digging into those photos hasn’t been easy, so you’ll always have the ability to click through to them within the new Maps experience.

Jones and Seefeld walked me through Google Earth’s integration, which now requires no plugin or software download. Still, the features seem to be more than the regular person would use, unless they have a lot of time. It’s clear that Google wants people to see its Maps product as a place to discover new places, plan an adventure and then explore.

The new visual effects to zoom in and out of locations is seamless, and pretty neat. One moment you can be looking at a flat map, the next, a 3D rendering with satellite imagery:

Keep pulling back and then you’re in the solar system. Want details? The renderings of Earth come complete with real-time clouds:

My favorite part has to be the photo tours, which stitches the photos taken by Google, as well as users, and morphs them all together into a “walk-through” tour. This works really well for big tourist destinations, like this example in Rome:

Too much?

If you want to try the new Google Maps experience, you’re going to have to sign up and wait in line here: http://maps.google.com/preview. I’m told that some of the functionality from this will find its way into the iOS and Android versions of the app, but for the most part, this is very similar to what you’ll find on those apps. Not much is missing.

The effects are stunning, with shadow effects, new design elements and social cues to check things out. Will it encourage people to use Google Maps longer, or will they just come to get directions, send them to their phone or print them out and then be on their way? That remains to be seen, but Google has definitely thrown the kitchen sink into the product. Everything that the Maps team has been working on over the past ten years is here.

Luckily, it’s all formatted in a way that doesn’t stop you from performing simple tasks. The imagery sits at the bottom of the screen, but is more readily available than it was today. The team tells me that they’ll be collecting feedback, which should make the eventual transition to the new design a little easier for everyone to take.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at I/O, Google rebranded “Hangouts” as a new unified, cross-platform messaging system. It lets people text, photo, and group video message across Hangouts’ Android and iOS apps, plus its Gmail and Google+ site integrations. Hangouts rolls out today, replacing Google Talk [GChat] and G+ Messenger. While it doesn’t support SMS yet, it could challenge Facebook Messaging and Apple’s iMessage.

For over a year, whispers from GigaOm, Droid Life  and others signaled Google would undertake a big unification of its fragmented messaging offering. Today Google will offer new free iOS and Android Hangout apps, the Google+ integration, and you can upgrade from Google Talk to Hangouts by clicking on your photo in the Gmail chat list. There are currently no plans for other platforms like Windows Phone or Blackberry.

Google’s Vic Gundotra said at I/O today in San Francisco that “Technology should get out of the way so you can live, learn, and love.”  Operating systems and devices shouldn’t matter. You just want to talk with those you care about. That’s the point of the revamped Hangouts. It brings humans and conversations to the forefront.

Hangouts Is The Messaging Kitchen Sink

Presence, Circles, And Delivery

Let’s take a closer look at the features Hangouts offer. Presence, or knowing when friends are available to chat, is a big focus. You can see when friends are on Hangouts, if they’re currently typing, and if they’ve seen your messages [also known as read receipts]. Using Google+ Circles, you can select specific friends or a whole group to start a chat with.

Hangouts takes care to deliver your messages to whichever web interface or mobile app your friends are using. If you’re offline, Hangouts will store your messages until you return. Unlike Google Talk, it won’t send you an email every time you get a message while offline. It only pings you by email if someone starts a conversation with you while you’re away. Hangouts won’t send you duplicate notifications on different platforms, and you can snooze notifications all together if you need some quiet time.

The idea is that you can start, stop, and restart a conversation as you move between platforms, and you can chat with friends across the desktop, Android, and iOS devices.

Text, Emoji, Photos, And Video

Of course you can send simple text messages, but where Hangouts shines is in vivid multi-media communication. To spice up your words, you can add any of 850 hand-drawn emoji. You can send photos in Hangouts, which are saved to a saved to a Google+ album that you and you conversation partners can view, edit, and share later. In fact, you can go back and view your photo and messaging history at any time, or you can turn history off so your dispatches aren’t saved.

The crown jewel of Hangouts is its namesake’s video chat. You can talk face to face with up to 10 friends at once. When you’re in a video chat, you’ll see who is talking in a big window while the rest of your chat partners are shown in tiles below. Friends’ Hangouts will ring when you call them, and they’ll get notified if they miss the digital meetup.

But Hangouts video isn’t just a group FaceTime. Google added a bunch of bells and whistles. You can add visual and sound effects or make use of special Hangouts apps. So if you want to wear a virtual pirate hat or set off some fireworks, you can. You can watch YouTube videos simultaneously with friends while laughing together, and take screenshots to capture moments for later.

No SMS, Yet

The biggest feature missing from Hangouts is the ability to send and receive SMS messages to and from friends who don’t have a Hangouts app installed. This means Hangouts isn’t truly universal. Several of its competitors allow it, including Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Messenger For Android (but not for iOS).

So if you want to pull mom into a Hangout, you might have to send her a standard SMS from your phone and tell her to install the Hangouts app. That could be significant stumbling block. However, Google tells us SMS support is one of the most requested features from Hangouts testers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes in a future update.

Oddly, Google tells us that in some countries, feature phone users, but not smartphone users, can participate in Hangouts via SMS. This should help it reach more people in the developing world, a core area for growth of messaging apps.

Other missing features include voice messages or VoIP, but you could just use a video call without looking at the screen to approximate voice calling. There’s also no Hangouts On Air broadcasting to YouTube yet.

Why Google Needs Unified Messaging

The messaging space has become a battleground recently with independent messaging apps like WhatsApp and Line competing with Apple, Facebook, and Google to rule private communication. Everyone wants to become the high-tech successor to SMS.

For Google, messaging could create a wealth of engagement and monetization options. Of course Google could monetize Hangouts directly by cramming ads in it somewhere, or selling special effects for video chat and stickers for text.

A stronger, cross-platform chat experience in Gmail could boost time spent there, where Google already shows ads. It could also finally give people a real reason to use Google+.

Most importantly, though, Hangouts could humanize Google. Still viewed as a search and ads company, people don’t think about it first when they want to socialize. Hangouts leverages all of Google’s powerful technology to bring people closer together.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Photos have always been at the center of the Google+ experience and at I/O today, Google announce a major update to Google+ Photos that now makes use of the many of the tools the company acquired when it bought Nik Software last September. The focus of this update is squarely on automating a lot of the photo editing and sharing process. Google+ can now, for example, automatically enhance the tonal distribution in an image, soften skin, sharpen certain parts of an image and remove noise – and all of those computations happen in the cloud.

As Google’s Vic Gundotra told us before the event (and reiterated today), “you don’t take a photograph, you make it.” Users spend thousand of dollars to make photos great, he noted, but photography is still labor intensive and organizing photos is often still a hassle. “It takes time, and most of don’t have the time,” Gundotra said.  But what if Google’s data centers could be your darkroom?

So what if Google could automatically fix your image sand pick the best ones and highlight them automatically? That’s another new feature the company is launching today. The system can now analyze your images and kick out blurry photos, duplicates, images with bad exposure (which it will try to fix). It can also recognize good images with certain landmarks, for example, and detect faces and see if people are smiling and/or of those people are in your Google+ circles. It will also try to make some decision based on aesthetics. What used to take hours of work, Gundotra said, now happens automatically in the cloud and take seconds.

Using all of this, the system can make greenery pop, soften skin tones, clean up the color of the water and apply local enhancement to contrast and other features automatically. It can also automatically remove red eyes. Users can, of course, apply all of these enhancements separately as well.

The original images, of course, always remain untouched and users can easily toggle back and forth between the enhanced version and the original.

Now that Google offers everybody 15GB of free storage, users an also upload 15GB worth of full-size images to Google+ Photos. In addition, the autobackup feature provides unlimited storage space for photos at sized under 2048px.

Auto Awesome

In today’s age of animated GIFs, the Google+ team also decided to get in on the game – but with a twist. The system – which is apparently called “Awesome” – can automatically detect when an image is part of a series and stitch it together in one image or an animated GIF. “If we detect that you took a series of photos, in burst mode or otherwise, we can stitch them together,” Gundotra told us. To recognize these images, the system does a bit of analysis to make sure the background hasn’t moved.

This is about more than animated GIFs, though. This new feature – which Google calls “auto awesome” – can also automatically create a group photo from a series of photos and pick the one where everybody is smiling. It can stitch together landscape photos to create panoramas and create HDR images from a series of photos where it detects bracketed exposures. All of this happens extremely fast, too, thanks to the power of Google’s data centers.

All of these features are going live today and Google has already gone back and created “awesome” images for all of your existing photos in Google+.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Realmac Software is showing off its latest app today, ahead of a launch to come later in the month. The app is called Analog, and is an iPhone version of its desktop quick and easy photo manipulation software. I’ve been beta testing the software, and the experience it provides is in keeping with Realmac’s other recent mobile releases, like the super simple to-do app Clear it created in concert with Impending. So why does the world need yet another mobile photo app with filters? I asked Realmac Software head honcho Dan Counsell to find out.

“It seems like most of the current popular photo apps are competing on features, they keep cramming more and more into them to try and outdo each other,” he explained. “In doing this they have become overly complex and confusing for new users. Camera apps should be fun to use with a minimal interface that just stays out of the way allowing the user to focus on what really matters, their photos.”

That’s what Analog manages to achieve. It inherits this approach to simplified photo editing from the desktop version, but adds touch-specific interfaces and controls that are much better suited to the iPhone’s screen. These use a bold, flat design that emphasize clean lines, large hit hit points and a grid-like pattern that provides all your sharing and editing options in as few screens as is possible.

Another aspect of Analog’s simplicity is that it doesn’t try to replace the social networks you already use with a new one. That’s by design, according to Counsell.

“Online services come and go but by having an app that’s service agnostic we can easily adapt to change.,” he said. “Not to mention the fact that it’s easier for users to have one app that posts to multiple services rather than having to hop in and out of a bunch of different apps.”

Analog started out as an idea that was actually pretty far removed from mobile photography. Counsell said the original Mac app was inspired by his own love of photography, which inspired a need for software that wasn’t quite as daunting or involved as something like Photoshop.

“I love my DSLR and take the majority of my photos with it, so developing Analog for the Mac first was an easy decision,” he said. “After the Analog for Mac launch we had a lot of requests from users saying they wanted it on iOS, so we thought we’d give it a shot and see what happens.”

Realmac is behind Courier, LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver in addition to Clear, and has a solid reputation among Mac fans and iPhone users. Analog will be available on the iPhone at launch a little later on this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“What are the cool new apps you’ve seen lately?” To this oft heard question, lately, there have been lots of answers. So, mobile is indeed exciting and moving fast. And, just recently, a fun new app came out that instantly captured my attention — no, it’s not from a Stanford dropout or from the  ”innovation lab” of a large technology company. No. It’s from Snoop Dogg — excuse me — Snoop Lion. Yes, that’s right, the same artist so many of you grew up with. He’s diversified his musical career into the business of his own branded apparel, a television show, and now he invades the greatest consumer stage of our times — our mobile phones. And, what’s more impressive is just how he did it — the genius to observe and iterate, to pull out the nuggets of lessons we have learned and package it together with marketing that’s both fun, easy, and devilishly derivative yet simultaneously novel.

The app is called “Snoopify.” I think it’s both a noun (the app) and a verb (as in, to “Snoopify” a photo). Essentially, you can take a new or existing picture, and then open up a box of Snoop stickers (that’s right, stickers) and overlay them onto the picture before sharing it on every social platform . Most of the stickers, as you can imagine, have something to do with Snoop and his brand, which makes for a hilarious “Snoop filter” on these doctored photographs. The first time I downloaded the app, I  ”Snoopified” about five times in the span of 10 minutes and shared them everywhere. Snoop has essentially digitized himself and appified a scalable way to photobomb any picture with his signature brand. And, this is the best part — if you want to unlock the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pages of stickers, pull out your credit card because they’re locked behind a paywall.

In-app purchases. Genius.

From a marketing and branding standpoint, this is all fascinating to me. Look at the intersections of trends here: (1) Photos remain the premium communication currency in our mobile world. Like SnapChat showed with their expiring images, there’s no end to the creative manipulation mobile software can offer to pictures. (2) Influencers with their own global, diverse audiences can leverage networks like Twitter and Instagram to breakthrough the noise and clutter of the iOS app store distribution minefield. There’s the tactic  of growth hacking, yes — and then there’s the pure organic lift a celebrity can leverage to surpass everyone else. And (3) Stickers. Just a few months ago, everyone was hemming and hawing about Path’s latest 3.0 update which include new sets of free and paid stickers, perhaps influenced by the growth of mobile messaging apps in Asia (such as Line, an app which reportedly raked in US$50M+ in Q1 of 2013 by selling virtual goods in-app).

So, Snoop and his team watch all these trends converge, and steal a page out of the apps like Line and Path. Great artists steal, right? And, what do you know, it worked — I bought stickers, my first in-app purchase of a digital good. Brilliant.

I’ll be writing more about the overall trends I’m seeing at the app layer here in my column this summer, but an app like Snoopify, which rose quickly in the charts earlier this week, breaks convention with how much of the startup world views  how apps are supposed to be made and distributed. Distribution may, in the end, be just as, if not more, important than the actual app. Maybe. The creator of the app doesn’t actually have to do the hard-coding of the software — he or she can commission it, and it can be developed elsewhere. Of course, as I finalize this post, the app has already slipped in the charts. When I started drafting this post a few days ago, “Snoopify” was in the Top 25 trending free apps according to App Annie, but now as I finalize this early Sunday morning, it’s slipped to #36 (on AppData) and #58 (on App Annie) and is ranked #156 for grossing according to the official Apple App Store.

An app like Snoopify was destined to be faddish and not a business. Or, maybe this is just the first move by Snoop Lion to cut into the iPhone, on the app level. At scale, it’s an incredibly clever technique to extend his brand on top of other peoples’ pictures — the greatest photobomb at scale….ever! Perhaps he doesn’t see enough quality engagement on his work in popular music apps like Spotify or Rdio or other myriad music apps. Maybe he’s tired of Instagramming and receiving hearts in return, or maybe Twitter is just for distribution to his fan base. Maybe after stickers, he’s going to open private messaging inside his app, or broadcast scenes from his next concert to a select audience. (I’m having fun with this, naturally, though it’s not out of the realm of possibility.)

The opportunities on mobile are continuing to prove endless, and for someone as creative as Snoop, even a little mobile icon can represent the largest of sandboxes. Of course, not every artist can go to the lengths that Snoop went to in developing and promoting his mobile app, but of the ones who do have this luxury, Snoop’s foray into the  app store was a brilliant move, complete with a built-in revenue model, a platform for showcasing his brand, and artfully blending some of the biggest trends in consumer mobile behavior we have all collectively observed. Well played, Snoop — well played.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook released version 2.0 of its Pages Manager app for iOS on Wednesday, making it faster and including features like photo filters and stickers from its other applications. However, it no longer includes detailed post insights such as clicks and People Talking About This, and it no longer allows page owners create offers.

Previously, page owners could get several metrics about each of their posts, but now the only per-post metric that’s available is overall reach. Tapping the number leads page owners to a screen where they can pay to promote their post. To see insights like Link clicks, engaged users or even shares, page owners now have to visit desktop.

Many page owners may see this as another way that Facebook is putting its revenue-generating Promoted Posts feature ahead of functionality for admins. For example, a recent change on desktop replaced page notifications in the admin panel with prompts to promote their posts. [Update: A Facebook spokesperson says these features will be integrated in the next version of the app.]

Another missing feature is offers. Pages Manager used to have an option to create an offer post, but that’s gone in Version 2.0. [Update: Again, Facebook says this is due back in a future release.]

A key improvement is that it’s now easier to scroll through a page’s Timeline and quickly view photos fullscreen. Facebook says it rebuilt the app for speed. It includes many of the elements from other apps, such as the photo uploading process and messaging feature. This means that page owners can now edit their photos and add filters to them, just as they can in the main Facebook app and Camera app. Page owners can also use stickers in their private messages with fans or customers, though that might not be appropriate for some businesses and organizations.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Thanks to Instagram, we rarely see photos taken from camera phones without some type of filter on it. Even Twitter’s photo service uses Aviary to drop an earthy overlay or black-and-white treatment onto your digital masterpiece. Google Glass users aren’t going to be left out of this craze thanks to an app aptly named Glassagram.

Again, this is the type of app that we’re seeing early on, consisting of the very basics that consumers will look for when thinking about whether Glass is a device for them, once they become available to the general public.

Adding filters to photos is pretty consumery.

Once you sign up for Glassagram, you simply share a photo with the service, then a card is sent back to your Glass timeline with all of your filtered options:

The timeline card is going to be a main component in every Glass app that we see, as it will be the primary way for users to interact with what they’re seeing. For now, options like “share” are all we have, but I could see a day where more advanced controls like editing could be available. Something like Glassagram would be a perfect case for this.

Once you get your options, simply scroll your way through them and reshare the one that tickles your fancy. It looks like you’ll get five different filtered options for your photo. The nice part about this is that it’s all done through the Glass UI, so you don’t need your phone or the web to do anything:

Technological marvel? No. Handy app and an example of what’s to come from Glass developers? Yes.

As I’ve been speaking with members of the Glass community, I’ve learned that quite a few companies are starting to look at the device to develop their own official apps, like Twitter. There seems to be interest in the developers who are getting a head start in the Explorer program from the companies, as well. This means that those poking around the Mirror API to figure out everything they can do might be able to land themselves a sweet job focusing on the device specifically.

Will a company like Facebook dedicate a small team to figuring out the right experience for its users on Glass? It’s a safe bet that they will. Until then, we get to enjoy these small, but evolutionary, apps coming from Glass explorers. It feels like the early days of another platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As time goes on and more Google Glass developers start tinkering around with their Explorer kits, we’ll start seeing all types of apps pop up for the device. The fun part about this is that we’re going to see all of the very basic, and necessary, apps being built first. You can share photos to Google+ out of the box with Glass, you can tweet them with GlassTweet, but a new service called Glassnost wants to break those photos outside of those networks onto its own site.

The name of the site, Glassnost, is a send-up to the Russian phrase “glasnost,” which is loosely translated to openness. The app connects to your Glass device, allowing you to share photos to the site, while visitors can “like” them. The killer part of the app is that once your photos get enough “likes,” your Glass device will start getting alerted that what you’ve shared has struck a chord.

That complete feedback loop is a perfect demonstration of why Glass is so interesting. Sure, you can send out photos and videos, see what the weather is and maybe send a text message, but doing something on the device and then getting some sort of feedback as you go about your day is awesome. This social feedback is a first for a Glass app built by third-party developers. Once you start getting likes, a card will pop up in your Glass timeline, showing you which photo got a “like” and when:

It’s basic, but it’s kind of fun to get that immediate feedback on a shot that you just took. Notifications are going to be a sticky situation for developers, as nobody is going to want to know about every single like or comment that they get on a service, since that defeats the whole purpose of the “calm technology” that Glass brings. Glassnost tries to intelligently alert you on the traction of your photos, giving you aggregated like numbers as your photo gets more popular.

Considering that a lot of smartphone users constantly check their device to see how many likes their Facebook status or Instagram photo got, this approach to sharing is a breath of fresh air.

As with any early service, there won’t be a ton of content on Glassnost until it has more users. The Glass community does, however, need a third-party to share their photos with the world, which is a way to cut through all of the noise of whether Glass is the second-coming of Jesus devices or a complete bust. The apps that get bult for Glass and the experience that people have will be the deciding factor on all of that, not the typical and predictable rushes to judgement of the tech press.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch