“Glass is a very ‘right now’ device,” he says. “So when you deliver data to the user, you want to do it in the moment, and keep it up to date.” It should matter to them based on what they’re doing right now, he says.

Other tips include staying out of the user’s way (it will be interesting to see if Facebook Home makes its way to Glass) and “avoiding the unexpected”.

He shares something they’ve been working on with the New York Times, which shows headlines over top of photos (actually not unlike status updates on Facebook Home), and lets you click to have the article read aloud.

He also shares an email exchange and a look at Evernote and Skitch.

Give it a watch:

The Google Glass team hosted a developer panel at SXSW Interactive where they showed off a variety of third party apps for the platform. This is the first time that Google has shown anything beyond in-house software for the device, and the results are promising.

To prevent any unwanted notifications or annoying interruptions that would seem inherent to wearable computing, Google is putting strict guidelines into place for app developers. The four main rules are “design for glass,” “don’t get in the way,” “keep it timely,” and “avoid the unexpected.” These four rules will hopefully ensure that Glass never becomes a nuisance.

Sticking to these design principles, The New York Times app really seems to embrace what Glass can bring to consumers. First and foremost, the app can deliver hourly breaking news updates to your peripheral vision, but only if you want it to. To view news manually, you just have to use the “look up” head gesture to have a stream of images and headlines delivered to Glass.

Other third party app developers include Path and Evernote. Both of which allow you to share images with people right from Glass while also receiving notifications when friends upload photos to each respective service.

As for Google’s own services, the company showed off how Gmail will work on Glass. For starters, users can reply to emails using Glass’ built in microphone. The app can also be configured to only deliver emails marked as important to Glass so that your peripheral vision is not always bombarded with each and every email sent your way.

Here’s a video taken at the talk showcasing how Gmail works on Glass:

Other developers will be able to start developing for Glass later this year when the Mirror API is released. Google will probably be holding more hackathons for Glass as well in the near future, and maybe the next one won’t be exclusive to those who preordered the hardware at least year’s Google I/O.

[h/t: The Verge]

Mozilla’s vice president of products, Jay Sullivan, was on a panel at SXSW talking about the mobile browser wars. On the topic of iOS, he said that Mozilla has no plans to bring Firefox to the platform. He also said that you won’t see Firefox on iOS as long as Apple continues to restrict third-party browsers.

The main issue here is that Mozilla can’t use its Gecko rendering engine on iOS. Apple requires all browsers to use the WebKit rendering engine that’s employed by Safari, Google Chrome and many others. It doesn’t help that Safari is the default Web browser in iOS, and users can’t change that unless they jailbreak their phone.

Mozilla could easily get on iOS if it switched to WebKit, but the company doesn’t appear to be doing that anytime soon. Instead, it will push for Apple, and others, to allow more browser choice on platforms. It’s this choice that makes the Web great according to Sullivan.

Besides, Mozilla can’t focus on iOS right now as it’s currently busy with getting Firefox OS out to market. The new mobile OS poses no threat to Apple, but it’s definitely doing things the Mozilla way – fiercely independent and maybe even a little reckless.

[h/t: CNET]

There have been rumors swirling for a while now about the festival organizers’ motives for turning it down, including that they received too many complaints from locals that it didn’t fit in with their idea of what the festival is all about (the film allegedly depicts graphic sex scenes and violence). A person involved with SXSW said, “It’s got an ugliness and a deadness to it.”

But it probably doesn’t help that even the film’s director, Paul Schrader, was aware of the ramifications that Lohan’s last movie, the Lifetime Original Debacle “Liz & Dick”, would have on his work. In fact, “The Canyons” was pushed back for release because of it.

“The intense reactions to ‘Liz and Dick’ and the Times Mag article have made us realize that there will be an immediate blowback once ‘The Canyons’ is publically screened -– for good and ill,” he said. “That’s the nature of anything involving Lindsay.”

“It seems like a subtle thing, but the impact of this new technology is quite profound,” said Paul Davison, CEO and founder of Highlight.

As he explained to us, users have been sharing actively by posting a pictures and statuses for a long time. This new concept, which is also known as social discovery, allows users to share passively, which has not been possible before.

“All of a sudden, for the first time in history, we can take a little profile of ourselves and just sort of emit it from our phone, wherever we go,” said Davison. “It’s gonna have a profound impact on how we learn about each other and socialize in the real world.”

With ambient social networking the hot new trend, and Highlight emerging as the leader in the space, speculations are starting to spread as to whether it could be the next Twitter or Foursquare. Davison told us that, since it adds a new connectivity to the world and helps to create friendships and partnerships, Highlight could very easily be the next big social service.

“If you build this product the right way, you can build something that almost anyone in the world will find tremendously useful,” he said. “It has the potential to be a very big thing.”

Could Highlight be the next Twitter or Foursquare? Let us know.

Ambient social networking really took off at SXSW this year, and Highlight specifically, seemed to steal the show. Davison told us that, although it was challenging to build the product, it was rewarding to see how people are finding so many different ways to use it.

For instance, one man was able to hitch a ride to Austin for SXSW after connecting with someone on Highlight. Other people have found that Highlight has helped them connect with old friends and even close business deals.

At this point, Davison said the app is more about serendipity. But, he believes as smartphones become more ubiquitous and battery life and other technologies improve, consumers will find daily uses for the service.

Highlight doesn’t have a lot of features, and Davison told us he hopes to keep it this way. His vision is to keep it simple like the Google search box, so that users can be assured that it will always work.

Like many other startups, Davison told us that monetization is not a priority for Highlight right now. He said he is confident that it will be able to be profitable but that the current focus was on reaching critical mass.

While ambient social networking apps are similar to check-in services like Foursquare, Davison said they each serve different roles. He said Foursquare is more focused on connections between people and places whereas Highlight emphasizes people-to-people connections.

Foursquare’s CEO Dennis Crowley, however, has admitted that check-in services have lost some of their initial appeal and that he has plans for evolving the product. Although this could mean that Foursquare is going to break into ambient social networking as well, Davison still believes there will be room for both players.

It’s clear that many people are fascinated by the cool elements of Highlight and other ambient social networks, but it’s also clear that some are finding them creepy. In fact, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore even called them the “scariest tech trend of 2012.”

In a piece for CNN, he wrote:

“The potential problem should be obvious: Privacy. This new generation of apps broadcasts your location at all times to friends — and in many cases to people you don’t even know. The physical distance at which alerts are sent varies, but some app developers propose that being in the same city as a contact would be enough to trigger a message.”

For Highlight in particular, Davison told us that privacy concerns are taken seriously. For starters, the app is opt-in only, and it doesn’t scrape other sites for information. It is also only available through Facebook in order to verify real identity. In addition, the Facebook integration lets users control who sees what, whether it be friends of friends, friends only, etc.

“If you want to build a successful product in the space, you really have to earn people’s trust,” Davison pointed out.

In response to the “creepy” factor, he said that anytime a new social app is introduced, the privacy alarms that people have are a “natural reaction.” He said that if people didn’t raise concerns about new technology, he would be worried.

It’s a completely new concept, but once the early adopters and influencers convince their friends to try it, the service often becomes mainstream. This, of course, is what happened with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and many other popular social apps.

People such as Robert Scoble and Chris Brogan are the type of influencers that have the power to sway users toward these trends. Incidentally, Robert Scoble actually gave a promising prediction for Highlight in a blog post he recently wrote:

“I predict that a company in this field will be a multi-billion-dollar company in market cap within four years. I’m betting it’s Highlight, but who knows? That’s what makes this industry fun, the whole thing could change by Friday and probably will.”

Although a Scoble endorsement is very significant, he’s wise in saying that time will be the true indicator of what will come of Highlight.

How do you feel about ambient social networking and Highlight? Is it a trend you’re open to try? Let us know.

After you realize the magnitude of the SXSW festival you might have to put it on your ‘must attend’ list for next year. Devour these tantalizing facts and just imagine how great it would be to find yourself aboard for next years festivities. Thank TracX for this wonderfully informative infographic:

Fiona Apple fans were treated to a performance by the artist, who previewed her first new material in five years. It had been as long since she performed outside of LA, according to Rolling Stone. Apple will have a new album out in June.

Of course it wasn’t all new material. Videos are all over YouTube (some are better quality than others). I’m guessing they won’t be pulled down, since Apple has them plastered all over her site.

All of her tour dates except one in New York are sold out.

The panel of developers include Pete Hollenhorst of LG, Alan Queen of MOVL, and Harper Lieblich of Clear Channel. The developers talk about why they have decided to support Google TV with their various technologies.

The talks were conducted over a Google+ hangout. If you missed it, Google developers have posted the entire 27 minute conversation on their YouTube channel. Check it out to see the new developments coming to Google TV.

Here’s the official description for the session:

If you build it, they might not come, if you haven’t thought about how search engines view your web site. Forget testing for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Search engines are the common browser that everyone uses. The good news is that search engine optimization (SEO) doesn’t mean terrible design or some type of black-magic trickery. Rather, there are good, sensible things that everyone should do that pleases both search engines and human visitors. In this session, representatives from Google and Bing provide this type of advice. They’ll even get you up to speed on the impact that social media is playing on search results. Even better, it’s all Q&A. Bring your top questions about how they rank sites and get answers directly from the source.

The official SXSW page has the audio for the entire session. Hat tip to Barry Schwartz for pointing to this specific part of it.

During the Q&A, one webmaster asked how a mom and pop doing its own optimization can stand a chance against all of those who are spending thousands of dollars on SEO.

“The way that I often think about SEO is that it’s like a coach,” said Cutts. “It’s someone who helps you figure out how to present yourself better. In an ideal world though, you wouldn’t have to think about presenting yourself and whether search engines can crawl your website, because they’d just be so good that it could figure out how to crawl through the Flash, how to crawl through the forms, how to crawl through the javascript, how to crawl through whatever it is. And for the most part, most search engines have made a lot of progress on being able to crawl through that richer content.”

Regarding the people that are optimizing “really hard” and doing a lot of SEO, Matt says, “Normally, we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working on in the last few months, and hopefully in the next couple months or so, or you know, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it.”

“And the idea,” he says, “Is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level. So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website…the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on it…we have several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

Duane Forrester joked that Bing has some hamsters working on this in the back room, spinning some wheels. He suggested having a great product and being engaged socially. These are strong signals for Bing, he said.

Foursquare CEO,Dennis Crowley is a regular at SXSW and this year is no exception. He’s out in full force letting fans know that he has over 750,000 merchants on the line set to offer local deals to Foursquare users. He believes larger cities can benefit the most from the services as they are the most densely populated and packed with valuable products and services that square users are bound to want to take advantage of.

He wants to bring Foursquare into the mainstream with the introduction of all types of location-based deals. He aims to make the world easier to navigate via the social media platform. Crowley says that Foursquare is working to bring more merchant tools to their site in order to meet these lofty goals.

Check out the video with Crowley: