Ever since Google opened up the Google Glass Explorer program in April of this year, it has been an exclusive club of 8,000 select people who were selected in the #ifihadglass competition. If you are friends with someone lucky enough to own a pair of Google Glass and have an extra $1,500 in your bank account, you may want to ask them if they were one of the lucky Glass Explorers who were given the ability to invite up to three of their friends.
This is not the first time that Google has allowed Glass Explorers to invite a friend as they have trialled a similar program a few months back. With the passing months, there have been a few changes to the invite program.
Glass Explorers who were selected to be able to invite friends may now invite up to three of their friends rather than one.
Anyone who was invited to the Glass Explorer program via this method may now choose to have their Glass shipped rather than needing to make the commute to one of their three pickup locations (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco).
Now that there is no longer a need to commute to a pickup location, this eliminates the additional $300-$500 that Glass Explorers needed to spend in addition to the $1,500 (+tax) cost for the Glass itself. If you can afford to make the trip to one of the pickup locations, DO IT, trust me, It was a blast.
Aside from having a friend who can nominate you for the program, you need to have met the following basic requirements;
You must be 18 years of age or older
You must reside in the United States
You must have a Google Wallet account in Good Standings
If you cannot travel to one of the three pickup locations, you must provide a US shipping address.
There is currently no word on the number of Glass Explorers who the invite program is open to. I can confirm that the “Invite A Friend” notices did not go out to all glass explorers so it seems that it is only open to a small subset of users. I would strongly advise all readers to only speak to Glass Explorers that they currently know and avoid online auctions to compensate “explorers” for their invite as these have been used to scam people in the past.