On Thursday, the social network unveiled an app for Google’s wearable
computing system that will allow users to upload photos taken with
their Google Glass headset to Facebook. In addition to photos, people
can add text as descriptions for their images. Facebook said the
announcement, made at Google’s developer conference on Thursday morning,
was a first step for the social network, as it looks at new types of
mobile hardware.
“Wearable computing as a category is pretty exciting ,“ said Erick Tseng, a Facebook mobile product manager in an interview.
Tseng, who is a former lead product manager for Android, Google’s
mobile operating system, said the partnership was borne out of casual
talks with his former colleagues and friends at Google. While Tseng said
he wasn’t sure how wearable computers will impact Facebook in the
future, he said there was clearly a larger trend of “computing becoming
more miniaturized.”
For future updates, the team is looking into sharing information with Google glass, such as notifications.
Facebook joins several other social network services, such as Twitter and Path, which have also been developing apps for Glass.
Although Facebook is in many ways a top rival of Google, its lack of
in-house hardware has pushed the company to dive deeper into Google’s
products. In April, for instance, the company unveiled a version of its
Android application that takes over the home screen of Android phones
and more prominently displays Facebook services, such as chat messaging,
photos and news feed. Those efforts, however, have hit some bumps. The
app took several weeks to hit a million downloads and the reviews have been lukewarm AT&T T -0.40%
recently slashed the price of the HTC Home, the first phone created to
be optimized for the new Facebook experience on Android, from $99 to 99
cents.
According to Tseng, despite areas of competition, “it’s almost
inevitable that that partnership [between Facebook and Google] will grow
tighter and tighter.”
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