Canceled Glass.photo subscription
I canceled my membership on Glass.photo just now. It’s a very well-done, thoughtfully designed service/app, but I just don’t ever think to look at it or post to it. The users are polite and I only had good interactions with them, but for me it’s not as interesting as Instagram (for all of its many faults) or Flickr. Partially that’s down to me, because I didn’t take the time to follow enough people or dig into their newer category/camera filtering features.
One thing that always turned me off was the main browsing screen (which I won’t show here because I don’t want to give the impression that the photos on it aren’t interesting). It’s all images with zero metadata context unless you tap and slide on a photo to see who took it, or press on it to dive into more details. Flickr and Instagram do that better. I like seeing who made the photos as I scroll through the feed.
Photos on Glass tend to be very safe and non-confrontational (as far as I’ve seen). That may have something to do with Glass being bound by Apple’s rules to not allow any nakedness. That’s not such a great loss by itself except in the cases where it keeps some photographers from signing up at all. It makes Instagram look downright edgy by comparison.
I probably would have found more to like if I’d stayed longer and dug into it. And the fact that they made it viewable on the web is great, but it still feels closed off somehow, in a way that Flickr doesn’t. I still pay for Flickr and already wish I spent more time there, so Glass seemed non-essential after this long.
But I still recommend trying it. It’s nicely non-toxic in a way that Instagram can’t claim to be.