I look forward to a future in which we are all wearing ridiculously walled-garden tech on our faces, and a future in which we've gotten over it. I feel like just as we're slowly recovering the art of making food from the excesses of the early 20th century, our children's children will have to recover the art of being a social human being from the excesses of the early 21st century.
I recognize that otherizing an inevitable technology (ubiquitous connected vision) is taking the wrong side of history, but I hope my grandchildren make fun of my children for it.
I think it's interesting that the article did not describe the device's capacities at all.
In the meantime, I think Snapchat's marketing angle is ingenious. They decided to build trust, but not in the community of makers as Google did, they built trust in the community of shameless consumers (I mean that non-perjoratively). Google's mistake is understandable when you think that they are also trying to be respected in the cloud/app maker/developer space. Snapchat does not have that problem.
In retrospect, and especially in comparison, Google Glass really was beautiful, especially the lensless models. I respect the design in a similar way to something like the Microsoft Band, which didn't try to be a watch, but instead embraced the idea of a wrist-interface, with the display on the inside of the wrist, and running in-line with the band as opposed to perpendicular to it.
Maybe I'll feel that way about Spectacles in 2020.
Did they fix the privacy issues that arose with Google glasses or is everyone just conveniently forgetting that?
tldr;
1) Artificial Scarcity
2) Geographic Clustering
3) Buying As An Experience
4) Identifying customers
Edit: Included 4)
I would suspect that techies are not particularly avid users of Snapchat in the first place.
Wow. A pair of glasses that not even Karl Lagerfeld can make look cool.
Also- did Snapchat really think those tiny ballons were enough to lift that snapbot vending machine off the ground? Don't make me laugh, Snapchat!
TL;DR, don't make and market tech products for tech people, because they're all queasy autists who will make your product look dorky and ugly. Aim your products at the cool people, the beautiful people, the Kardashians and Iggy Azaleas of the world. They're the people who matter.
>If you want to make something cool, don’t give it to geeks first.
Does anyone else get really tired of stuff like this? Why is it that every possible difference is celebrated except within liberal circles, with the exception that nerds are considered objectively bad. In fact the article comes across as body shaming.
> That’s why the first memorable photos of Spectacles weren’t shot by Scoble, but by famous fashion photographer Karl Lagerfeld.
How soon we forget: Google Glass actually collaborated with Diane von Furstenberg (a famous fashion designer) and did a launch party at New York Fashion Week.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3001142/google-glass-hits-runway...
But Google positioned Glass as a platform for apps, meaning they had to get devs in the loop, while Spectacles are intended for precisely one thing: Snapchat.