This article was published on May 3, 2013

Fullscreen BEAM: The first YouTube app for Google Glass comes with public or private sharing


Fullscreen BEAM: The first YouTube app for Google Glass comes with public or private sharing

I picked up my Google Glass this week, and one of my first instincts was to share one of the cool POV videos out to YouTube and blast a tweet to my followers. I’m not always the most ‘on it’ when it comes to ‘leveraging trends’ and whatnot, but I think that Glass is interesting and I figured some other folks do as well.

But I couldn’t, because Glass doesn’t ship with YouTube support. Instead, you have to share stuff to Google+ and, for better or worse, I don’t really use it. Not only are my followers not used to seeing me post stuff there, you still can’t reliably cross-share to Twitter from it.

This is the share screen you see in your eyehole

But I knew it wouldn’t be much time before an option arrived, and now it has. Independent YouTube network Fullscreen has created a YouTube app called BEAM for Google Glass that works as a Sharing Contact. You add the contact and turn it on, and Fullscreen lets you choose whether to upload the videos to your signed-in Google account privately and whether you’d like to Tweet a link when you’re done.

I tried it out and it worked like a charm. The video description notes when you uploaded it and that it was shot with Glass. Currently there’s no way to tweak any sharing options on Glass so you get a timestamped title but overall it’s the smoothest, easiest way to share videos publicly but not through Google+ from Google Glass.

Fullscreen’s Head of Tech Solutions Drew Baumann is responsible for the app, which he says he made with Ruby on Rails. There’s a Mirror API gem for Ruby developers who would like to use the API as well, created by Baumann and Monica Wilkinson.

There are a few utility apps starting to pop up around Google Glass including Glass Tweet, which works in a similar way.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with