How Google is getting human with Google Glass - CNET

Action and human reaction all in one.

(Credit: Google/YouTube Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

I've always felt a little skeptical about Google.

To be honest, not just about Google.

But in the case of the men from Mountain View, there's always been something so touchingly gauche about the way they've gone about their business.

None of this was assuaged by the recent sight of Google's Sergey Brin sitting on New York's subway wearing his Google glasses and looking like, well, a nerd on the subway wearing silly glasses.

I feared, therefore, for the world's nerve ends when I heard that Google had launched a site to promote those very glasses.

These were the ones that, I imagined, would create insurance company claims and lawsuits aplenty as people crashed into each other on the street, while being blindly focused on getting their glasses to Google "local restaurants."

Yet Google's new site is bathed in a subtle delight.

Not only is there a certain sophistication of style, it has a remarkably un-Googlie sense of priorities.

For the first thing you read isn't "What Google Glass Does." Instead, it's "How It Feels."

This is a monstrously intelligent, sensitive, and human breakthrough.

The mere idea that Google's first concern is feelings makes me imagine Bill Gates suddenly standing up and declaring that his first concern was "Sesame Street."

It doesn't stop there, though. For the video that tries to explain how Google Glass will feel does an excellent job of making you believe that this clear attempt at mind control won't be nearly as obtrusive as you might have imagined.

Even the "What It Does" part of the site presents what could be feature-led, technobabble in large, involving pictures instead. It really is as if Spock has found himself a girlfriend who works at McDonald's.

Good Lord, these glasses even come in a range of colors. And lo, here's a rumor that Google wants them to look cool with the help of designer Warby Parker.

Now if only the company can take this revolutionary human attitude to the design of its purported new retail stores, you might almost imagine that Google is becoming a rather spirited neo-Apple.

Which might leave the question: What, in that case, is Apple becoming?

Feelings come first.

(Credit: Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)