Google Glass will likely be immensely useful for doctors, field workers, and other service providers. But for ordinary people, it’s disorienting and nerdy. 

But that hasn’t stopped developers from responding to Google’s request to build applications for Glass. Owners of the device now have a nifty news aggregation app dubbed “Thirst Droplet,” released today by Thirst Labs.

Thirst believes the investment in Glass was worthwhile and will help it reach “Generation C” (the “C” stands for “connected.”) Either way, it reportedly only spent around three days developing features for the app.

Thirst has already unveiled its Android and iPhone apps for personalizing and curating the news. Follow topics on a mobile device and the web, and Glass will send a push notification when it’s trending on social media. Hundreds of thousands of topics — such as “Oprah Winfrey,” “49ers,” or “Google” — are currently available for you to follow.

The Glass app takes the news experience step further, giving you the opportunity to listen to an entire article. You can also flag an article for future reading and email it to yourself straight from Glass. You can also “like” or “dislike” a story.

Thirst has differentiated itself from other news readers with its language processing tools. Rather than asking readers to discover news, the it automatically finds and presents the most relevant content in what Thirst says is an engaging way. The company tracks millions of data sources — blogs, social media, and so on — to determine whether news is trending.

Don’t miss the explanatory video below to see how the app works.

The Thirst news app for iPad

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” CEO Anuj Verma said in a recent interview with VentureBeat (pictured above), hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Similarly to news aggregation app Pulse, which LinkedIn recently acquired, Thirst Labs was formed by college friends. The founders are a pair of University of Berkeley, California grads who share a passion for UI, UX, and developing algorithms.

San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

Top image // Google Glass

News aggregation service Pulse debuted version 3.0 of its mobile apps for Android, iPhone, and iPad today, which brings lots of new features and interface tweaks.

The service allows you to pull in news sources from hundreds of different web publications and customize how it’s grouped together via category pages. With version 3.0, Pulse now lets you pin an unlimited number of sources/sites to your custom pages, and doesn’t limit how many different pages you can create. That should come in pretty handy for people who want to monitor for ultra specific news from just a handful of sources. For instance, you can now devote a separate page for NFL football, college football, baseball, college basket ball, etc.

After playing with the iPhone/iPad version for a while, it seems like Pulse 3.0 focuses on making its mobile apps more consistent with the recently launched web app version of the service. Pages are no longer displayed as horizontal tabs along the top of your sources. Instead, you navigate between pages using a sidebar that’s very similar to the web app. The new side bar also makes it much easier for you to reference any saved stories.

Pulse 3.0 also contains a new feature that lets you search for specific news that isn’t easily found within your custom pages. Its new news search tool scans Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, Google, Flickr, Blekko, and others.

The new apps (pictured below) are available now via the Google Play store and Apple’s App store.