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From SXSW: Sharing Comments On Web Pages With Glass

March 23, 2010 By 3 Comments

While at SXSW, I received an invitation to join the private beta for Glass. Thanks to Derek Shanahan and wonderful folks from Glass for the introduction to the service and the free drinks, heh. I’ve taken it for a spin the last couple of days and wanted to share my initial thoughts in this post.

What Is Glass?

Glass is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to add and share comments about a Web page. It’s similar to Google’s Sidewiki. Using the Glass plug-in, you can add a slide in which you add comments about that page. You can then share these comments with your Glass contacts who can view your comments and reply to them.

How Does Glass Work?

After installing the plug-in, you can pull up the Glass control on any Web page. To add a comment, click on the New Slide button.

A message box appears on the screen in which you can type your comment. You can also select your Glass contact(s) or contact lists to share the comments with in this box. Click “Create” to save the comment.

Once you save the comment, it will be visible every time you visit that page. To hide the slides, you can pull up the Glass control again and select the option “Hide Slides”. To make them reappear, select “Show Slides”.

Impressions

It’s an interesting tool although I don’t think it offers that much more added value over Sidewiki. I’m currently using it to share comments with my coworkers on our corporate website (what needs to be changed, what we need to add, et cetera). Using Glass for collaboration allows for quick on-screen reference and instant updates once changes have been made.

These are a couple of downsides I’ve experienced so far:

  1. Glass is a closed system, i.e. other people need to be on Glass too (and have the plug-in installed) to view comments and/or reply.
  2. I can’t add people after creating a slide, which is annoying if I forget someone or another person needs to see the backlog of comments and replies.

This is my quick first take on Glass. I’m curious to follow the developments and new features. If you’ve also worked with Glass, let me hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in trying out Glass, let me know (I have literally some invites).

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  • http://borderstylo.com jbeese

    Hey Kenneth! Thanks for trying out Glass and sharing your thoughts. Being in early beta, we depend a lot on the feedback from our users and we take every suggestion seriously. Like most betas, we're still building features. We received a lot of feedback regarding adding readers to an existing slide. It's something we're working on and should be available in an upcoming release.

    We like the idea of public comments and we're looking into a feature (tentatively) called Channels where people can post publicly. We're still toying with the idea, but if you have any thoughts on how you'd like it to run, we'd love to hear them!

    Thanks again for swinging by our booth and giving Glass a shot. Let me know if you have any other comments or suggestions.

    Jenn
    Community Manager
    Glass ID: jbeese

  • kennethlim

    Thanks for stopping by, Jenn! And great to know that you're following the feedback trail of your users :)

    I understand that the public sharing thing is tricky to pull off. One alternative is to be able to add an email address for people you'd like to share thoughts with. The email to those people would then contain a link to the specific page of the Glass user's feed. From there, they could reply (if needed).

  • http://borderstylo.com jbeese

    It's how we roll :)

    Thank you, once again, for the feedback. I've shared this with some team members already. We'll be sharing new features on our blog (http://blog.writeonglass.com) so be sure to stay tuned!