So this week actually delivered some stuff worth talking about, which hasn't always been true lately (remember when the big story a few weeks back was some app icon getting redesigned? riveting stuff).
First: Instagram finally showed up on Android on Tuesday. Finally. I've been on Android since my old Nexus One days and Instagram has been an iOS-only club since October 2010, which is a year and a half of me hearing "oh you should just get an iPhone" from basically everyone I know who's ever posted a photo of their lunch with a fake vignette on it. I downloaded it Tuesday night on my Galaxy Nexus, played around with it for maybe twenty minutes before bed, and honestly? Its fine. The filters are the same ones iOS people have had forever, it runs on Android 2.2 and up which is generous of them, and the interface didnt feel like an afterthought the way some ported apps do. I took a photo of my coffee maker at 11pm for no reason other than testing it out, slapped the "Earlybird" filter on it, and deleted it about four seconds later because it looked exactly as dumb as youd expect a photo of a coffee maker to look with a filter on it.
What I keep thinking about though isnt the app itself, its what it means that theyre no longer iOS exclusive. Instagram built a huge amount of its early cachet specifically off being the cool iPhone thing you had and your Android friends didnt. Theres a real chance opening it up to something like half a billion more devices changes what the app even feels like to use in six months. More people isnt always better for a photo app that trades on a certain kind of curated aesthetic. Ill be curious if it still feels the same later this year once its flooded with, well, everyone.
Then Wednesday happened, and Wednesday was weirder. Google put out a video for something called Project Glass, and if you havent seen it yet, go watch it before you keep reading this, because words dont really do it justice. Its glasses. Actual glasses, with some kind of heads up display built into the lens, and the demo video shows a guy walking around New York getting subway alerts and directions and text messages projected right into his field of vision, checking the weather, video chatting with someone while hes standing in a bookstore. Its very obviously aspirational and very obviously not a product youll be buying at Best Buy anytime soon, but I watched it twice over lunch and got kind of a chill both times, which doesnt happen to me watching product demos very often.
Heres my actual opinion on it, not just the "ooh futuristic" reaction: Im skeptical it'll ever look like the video. Not because the tech is impossible, Google clearly has something working enough to film a concept demo around, but because the video shows a guy who never once looks like an idiot wearing it. Every actual first-generation wearable Ive ever seen in person looks a little ridiculous on a normal human head, and Im guessing this wont be different. That doesnt mean its not worth building. I just dont think the honest version of this product ships looking like sleek black-frame sunglasses on a guy having a great day in Manhattan. It ships looking like ski goggles with a phone welded to the side, at least for a while.
Anyway between the two of these I think Glass is the more interesting story even though Instagram is the one I actually installed on my own phone last night. One's an incremental "we opened our platform" move, even if it's a genuinely big one for how the app grows. The other is Google publicly saying "here is a thing we think you'll be wearing on your face someday," which is a much stranger sentence for a company to say out loud in a two minute video. I dont know which one ages better. Ask me in a year.
Also, unrelated, but my desk lamp died sometime last night and I didnt notice until I was three paragraphs into writing this in near total darkness except for my laptop screen, so if this post reads a little unhinged that's probably why.