Glow.app is a global mood ring

Quincy Pince-Nez
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February 17, 2010
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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.

Comments (10)

Till (not verified) | February 17, 2010 - 1:25pm

Eh. No. If this were implemented as metadata on top of Twitter/Buzz messages, it might be interesting. But I can't imagine people using this in itself. It feels rather pointless.

Kev Orng (not verified) | February 17, 2010 - 1:26pm

No, the wave of blue over Vancouver would be when CANADA wins a Gold Medal. When the US wins, you'll get a few blue spots, but the rest will come up "Meh"

newbreednet (not verified) | February 17, 2010 - 1:51pm

I think this is magic. Imagine walking along a busy street in a strange place and looking for a bar to spend the evening in. Just pick the blue one! Once you get in, looking for a partner for the evening? Look for the blue ones! In the way that iTunes Genius gets better (in theory) the more people use it, so will this, and no doubt there will be all sorts of nasty-nasty data harvesting done out of all of this as well... but hey, if you've ever dreamt of being able to "see" someone's aura or "read" someone's mind... well, this is getting pretty close!

Cujo (not verified) | February 17, 2010 - 2:04pm

I think you should rate how you feel about this app using Glow and let the world see ur "aura" :P hahaha...honestly... it's pretty cool knowing how the world is feeling at a particular moment. Imagine if we know how the who world felt after 911 or after Obama became president...interesting stuff

Can become pretty powerful

Mr. McCabe (not verified) | February 18, 2010 - 6:12am

Yeah, that's a thought- because reaching for a Glow app when ever something happens is paramount on their mind. lol, especially a tragedy. nice try.

Gazoobee (not verified) | February 17, 2010 - 2:15pm

This app will fail in that different colours mean different things to different people.

Blue is for "sadness" or "defeat" in my part of the world. Red is for "anger," "hatred" etc. To others, red might be a warm glow-y kind of thing. Overall though, blue is hardly ever picked for anything "good." To pick it for the "good mood" colour seems a bit strange to me.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | February 17, 2010 - 2:31pm

Yeah - I am totally into color theory myself but if sad were blue and happy were yellow... which colors are you gonna see on the map? Yellow on a beige google map background may not really stand out.

yayer13 | February 17, 2010 - 2:18pm

wow. very smart. i definitely see this app becoming something bigger over time

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | February 18, 2010 - 4:56am

Pretty interesting how any review which is NOT a drooling review has been removed. This app is cute and clever following suit with apps like twitter or facebook's status updates. It's not all that new or inspired and is generally redundant next to it's predecessors but with an added graphical twist. To evoke it's own 5 point scale it ranks a 'meh'.

burnsLaGroon (not verified) | February 18, 2010 - 11:23am

I don't understand why this is on the front page of this site. It's an app that integrates the iPhone's geolocation function, and a cloud server, and it's cute, but it has no other notable features. The glowing reviews in the App Store also worry me -- they sound false. Do the creators have an 'in' with the 9to5mac crew?

My big question, in case I'm missing something: Why Is This News?