Even though Google Glass has taken a few shots lately, many of us at Mashable find it useful ... and fascinating. That's why we're launching Mashable Velocity for Google Glass, which alerts you when stories start to go viral, so that you're always in-the-know.

Specifically, when Mashable Velocity predicts that a story's about to go viral, you'll receive an alert on Glass. You can then either have Glass read the gist of the story aloud (via the bone-conduction speaker built into Glass), or you can share the story on your social networks that you've connected to Glass.

How Do I Personally Wear Glass?

For the most part — and potentially to the chagrin of those who are in my "Glass Photos" circle on Google+ — I wear Glass around my kids, and I capture all of those memorable moments when I wasn't ready with my smartphone/tablet camera. I have to admit that I do feel a bit odd wearing them out in public. Then again, lots of people wear huge DJ headphones in public — I'm certain those cans looked just as odd when people first started wearing them.

Looks aside, the true value of Glass will be realized if and when truly useful apps are released. For instance, I would love to see a Glass app that reads bar codes on food packaging, and let's me know if there are any controversial ingredients contained within (that's my new health kick). If I had that, I'd wear Glass every time I went to the market.

But back to the current day with Glass: I found myself reading more and more New York Times breaking news alerts or, more accurately, listening to the headlines read aloud to me via the bone-conduction speaker. While what the New York Times deems breaking news is important to me, so are other things, like Internet culture and social news. And that's our sweet spot here at Mashable.

Viral Prediction at Mashable: The Velocity Algorithm

Back in December, when we launched the new Mashable, we released a site that was built by our own hands on top of a homegrown algorithm called Velocity. Velocity scours the social web, collecting lots and lots of data around how people are engaging with published articles. It then pulls all of that data back to Mashable, dumps it into our own predictive engine, and forecasts which articles are about to go viral.

We dogfood Velocity: Mashable's homepage and section pages are then driven by it. Velocity decides which stories to promote in which areas of the page (this process is overseen by a human editor, of course, but Velocity greatly reduces the amount of busywork that a human has to do).

In much the same way that Velocity helps Mashable's human editors know what's hot on the site, our new Mashable Velocity for Google Glass app alerts you just before a Mashable story goes viral. With it — and a pair of Google Glass — you know what everyone is talking about on the social web, before they're talking about it. In a way, we've enabled Glass to help you see into the future.

Note: We wish more people could get access to Glass and make use of this app. Considering Glass likely won't go into mass production in the near future, should we release something like this for Android or iOS devices, too?

Tell us what you think in the comments, or come find us at Google I/O or in the sandbox.

Images by Mashable