Glow is a free iPhone app that allows you to find out how people around you or in a specific geographic location are feeling. Imagine you are at a concert and you want to know the mood of the audience right this instant. You open up Glow on your iPhone and submit your feeling. Five stars for “awesome” and one star for, well…”not so awesome”. Each of these stars represents a color. One star is red and five stars is blue and everything in between is the combination of these two colors. Once you submit your feeling, Glow takes you to the Map View and shows you the general sentiment for a given location based on these colors and the mixing of them.
The point is being able to share emotion with the cloud; to quantify happiness. Glow’s purpose is to show you right now how people are feeling around the world. With your participation through sharing your feeling/color with the people around you, you add to this evolving painting of the world. Imagine witnessing a wave of blue over Vancouver as the US wins the gold medal. That is what Glow is about; quantifying happiness in a visual way.
Glow provides multiple ways to view these feelings. For example, the Street View uses augmented reality to look at the feelings around you. Looking through the iPhone camera, you are given a view into the the real world, with an additional head’s up display showing nearby feelings as you move with your phone.
Glow integrates with popular social networks including Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to share your feelings with your friends and contacts. When you send your feeling to Glow, it will be shared as a status update, including a link that your friends can click to be taken to a custom webpage, showing them where you are and how you are feeling. All in all, Glow is about bring emotions into the “cloud” and sharing. The more users that Glow has the more useful it becomes. Being able to see in real-time how people are feeling is what gets us excited. Hopefully it will get all of you out there excited too.
