News App For Google Glass In Just Three Days

How Thirst Built The Ultimate News App For Google Glass In Just Three Days

Google Glass is the perfect medium for receiving news updates about the topics you care about, but up until today no one had quite perfected how to do that.

The New York Times app comes standard with every pair of the high-tech glasses, but only sends the paper’s top headlines on an hourly basis. News isn’t tailored to fit your interests, nor is the frequency of news headlines are sent to you. The result? You end up with a backlog of news stories in Glass you likely don’t care about. For those you do care about, the app is only capable of reading you the first few sentences of the story or letting you share the story with friends on Google+.

Enthusiastic about Glass’ potential for news, Thirst Labs set out this past weekend to create the ultimate news app for Google Glass users.

An idea it had been toying around with for a while, the team started working on its Glass app last Thursday, working around the clock between Thursday and Saturday to create the app its launching today: a whole new personalized news experience for Glass.

If you’re not familiar with Thirst, the social news platform lets you follow topics you’re interested in, and then curates content around those topics, giving you a customized reading list from sources around the web.

Rather than looking at article tags and titles like some other news readers, Thirst uses a natural language processing engine to scan literally millions of online news sources, blogs, and articles and determine what’s trending. Users can follow topics ranging from Google to the LA Lakers, and gain instant access to the most important stories surrounding those topics. Within Thirst users can then read an article (or flag it to read later), like or dislike it, and discuss the article with other Thirst users.

The app currently has over 100 thousand topics available to be followed, and is adding more everyday.

With its Glass app – called Thirst Droplet – the company is bringing a similar news experience to Google Glass. When you sign up for the Glass app you can select what topics you want to follow, and even specify the frequency that you receive those updates. A “curated” Glass experience, the news you receive on your Glass is always news you care about.

Thirst's language processing power gives it the ability to pick out the best news story on a particular topic, so if for instance, you're following the San Francisco Giants and they win a game, Thirst will pick the best story on the game from the entire web and send it to your Glass. You won't end up with multiple versions of the same story.

If you're interested in a lot of things, then that experience obviously has the opportunity to get a bit overwhelming. To help combat the issue, Thirst built-in a push settings page for tweaking the experience to your own personal needs.

You can set the minimum time between push notifications to your Glass anywhere from every 15 minutes to every 12 hours. So, you can get news as frequently, or as infrequently as you want. You can also set posts up to auto delete after a certain period of time so they don’t fill up your Glass, as well as delete when you email them to yourself or delete when you dislike them.

The Glass app also takes the news experience step further than the New York Times' current offering, giving you the opportunity to listen to an entire article if you want. You can also email the article to yourself from Glass for reading later on.

Building on Thirst’s existing social features, Thirst Droplet also gives users the ability to Like or Dislike a story. All those features make it one of the most robust apps currently available for Google Glass.

”The documentation was not the most straightforward, because it’s still new, but everything you need is in there if you’re persistent about looking. I think that’s why you’ve been seeing people busting out apps so quickly,” Han Kang, one of the developers at Thirst who worked on the project told Mashable.

“The tricky part for what we were doing is that we wanted to make stuff reusable,” he added. Thirst plans to open source some of its code for others to use in creating Glass apps in the future.

Check out the video above for an exclusive behind the scenes look at the process from start to finish.

If you have Glass, you can check out Thirst Droplet here. If you’re not a Glass user you can still experience Thirst’s social news reader on the web and with its iOS app.