If that is true and is adopted by app-developers in a non-spammy and non-annoying way I might actually start using it.
So far Google Now has only been Google using up my battery to tell me that my way home, will still take me 20 minutes by car, despite me having exclusively used the subway since before I signed up for Google apps. The one thing it does, it does wrong. That's a 100% failure-rate.
I don't know how much it has cost Google, but so far I would definitely rate it not worth it.
If you press the overflow button on the card, you can tell it you ride transit. If your transit system integrates with Google Maps, it will show that instead.
(Not the parent poster) I've told it multiple times that I ride transit. Occasionally it shows me the time tables for the closest transit stops, which is marginally useful, but it still tells me the driving directions to home each and every day.
That's the problem with expert systems - they have no reason to train on outliers like you (and me). They get far better statistics by suggesting the most common solution to everybody - occams razor.
So every search engine gives me links to buy a ticket or check a flight, when I search for keywords about aeronautics. Want to find a motherboard spec sheet? Get 100 links to where to buy motherboards. And guess what I see when I search for mathematical models?
>That's the problem with expert systems - they have no reason to train on outliers like you (and me).
I had to ride a shuttle between campus and an offsite parking lot for about 8 months while construction was going on at work. The shuttle actually drove a couple of miles past where it'd make sense to head toward my apartment and then I'd have to loop back around in a pretty non-obvious way when I got to my car.
Google Now figured this out within a couple of weeks of when I started riding the shuttle and would show my route accordingly. I was actually kind of shocked it managed that without any active input on my end.
Short version being, it does seem be be a matter of development focus if the by-car side of things is that good.
AFAIK in my city, public transport authorities signed some kind of exclusivity deal with a route-planning startup, and they don't give bus/tram timetables to Google. Maybe where you live there is a similar deal?
The startup itself is not that bad, but having this data available in Google Maps and Google now would be strictly better. I've experienced this in Hanover once and I know how cool it is.
In my city (Nuremberg, Germany) Google seems to ignore the very fact the subway is operating in the city (and it's 40+ years there).
The stations are not on the map, and that's it.
Google needs timetable data, and since they're a company, they can't just go and scrap the timetables from the official website and call it a day. They have to arrange for whoever runs the public transport system to provide this data, and sometimes the city refuses.
For Google Maps, they used satellite imaging and cars with cameras. They didn't ask the government to give them the information / data besides the necessary permits.
A company can't just expect that the data holders will blindly comply with them because the result would be an improvement over the current solution.
Google Maps makes huge use of government data (particularly in the US where the government makes detailed imagery available under a free license).
I'm also confused what your point is. TeMPOraL expressed an opinion but having this data available in Google Maps and Google now would be strictly better.
That isn't a forceful argument that cities must comply with the demands of Google, but you seem to be answering it as if it were.
Using your words, it's a lamentation that Google provides no service at all.
I was reacting to TeMPOraL in that way because it felt like there was some kind of entitlement for the data.
Public entities ow the data to nobody and especially not to companies.
For sure, it would be great if city administrations and public entities did have some kind of API but the overhead would be just too big to justify the cost.
Having commercial partners for those APIs would be one way to fund it but I don't think that it would be a sustainable model world-wide.
I agree with the idea that the data should be open to the public. Research funded by public grants should be in the same category as well.
But as a developer I know how quickly the technologies and developer needs change. There are often threads on the front page of HN and /r/programming about the technology turnover being too quick. From this practical point of view I find it difficult to see how an public entity could justify funding for stuff like this.
Also using companies like Google as an example for data-openness is not the best argument. API bait-and-switches are just too common these days.
I didn't use Google as an example, I used that particular effort as an example. It involves dozens of transit providers opening their data, with no intermediate reliance on Google.
As far as the spending, the public entity already has to have some sort of record of their scheduling. The justification for sharing it is simply that making things easier to use increases use of them. Perhaps that isn't the case, but it shouldn't take months of time to set up a system to dump an existing database, so for systems with thousands of users it should not be a significant expense.
Technology turnover is irrelevant, programmers are well used to extracting data from old systems. Anything good nowadays will be good enough in 20 years (e.g. XML is from '98, and still vastly used).
Why can't they? The information is publicly available. It's probably not in a normalized format (like you'd get from following schema.org). It is however HTML data that can be contextualized by algorithm and by human. Why can't they scrape it, open it and allow users to review/update it? They provide some of that process with Google Maps. A Good Will in my town moved. The map was wrong. I said, "Nope, it's over here". Within about 4 hrs, it was moved.
As a developer I agree whole heartedly that it would be much more convenient if they did but you can't just expect public and semi-public entities to follow technological trends without getting a share of the benefits.
I'm in the Netherlands. Google has access to Dutch public transport schedules, yet Google Now persistently fails to detect when I use public transport. It even tells me I parked my car at the train station!
It is slowly getting better in detecting bicycle use, though.
>So far Google Now has only been Google using up my battery to tell me that my way home, will still take me 20 minutes by car, despite me having exclusively used the subway since before I signed up for Google apps.
Suggestion:
Go into the google app on your phone, tap the menu button and tap Customize==>Everything else==>How do you Usually Get around? Set to Public Transit and save. Done.
I understand the frustration of Google Now not noticing you're riding public transit and automatically learning your preferences, but I'm using Google Now and it defaults to telling me public transit times just fine.
If you're using Lollipop, just above the travel time card there should be a small ellipsis icon (...) where you can change your preferred travel method to biking, driving, walking, public transit or tell it you don't care about travel times at all. It even lets you configure preferred routes if you take PT.
Also, travel time is only one of the features of Google Now, it can tell you current weather, nearby dining and entertainment, upcoming appointments, travel information such as flight data for trips it has learned about through gmail or your calendar.
I'm not saying Google Now is great and that you should use it, whether or not it has enough value is completely dependent on your use-case. But if you're having a 100% failure rate, it's likely due to configuration or exclusivity agreements as mentioned in other comments. (Unless your phone isn't running Lollipop which would be a completely different conversation)
I think the work identification routine is probably pretty simple. Determine home by where the phone spends a long stasis/charging period, likely overnight, and then find the most common recurring location that visited during the day during weekdays over a prior period. It's probably good for the vast majority of people.
If you ever want to use it again, you -should- be able to manually set your work locations in the Now settings. Theoretically. At least, that worked for me.
If you're using Lollipop, bring up Google Now, then swipe from left of the screen to the right to bring up the menu.
From there, you can click "Customize" which allows you to update your card preferences.
In your case you'd want to update the work location under "Places". Tap your work place, tap the address and update it with any place you are interested in travelling to on a daily basis. (This is actually the "Daily Commute" location, it's just automatically labelled as work) Alternatively, you could just relabel it from "Work" to "McDonalds" and then you'd at least overcome the 100% failure rate issue.
This is Customize menu is also where you can give Now your local cable provider for TV schedules, sports teams and stocks for tracking and aggregated access to all your general preferences for Now as well.
Are business customers able to turn on Google Now for their domain hosted email yet?
I remain without a Gmail account, all of my email passes through several Google Apps accounts. Google Now has been a tease for years... it appears to offer the features I desire, but none of them are available to me.
Email scanning for flight information, appointments, etc... just doesn't happen.
I keep Google Now enabled, but pretty much all it can tell me is where I am, and what the weather is like. But this isn't that useful. I want the rest.
> Not only will it fold the information you care most about into a single Google Now wrapper, it will help control the deluge of information and notifications that come with poking in and out of a dozen apps a day.
Wouldn't this face the same challenges as managing an e-mail account to prevent too much spam/noise? Or is there some way Google Now scales with number of apps that cuts spam down? It seems like the more apps it supports, Google Now would have to be increasingly strict on what apps are allowed to push to the single wrapper.
What would be interesting to me is to see the "what cards do I want to see?" logic used with the core set of Google Now information applied to these other app notifications.
As in, Now learns what app's announcements or what kind of announcements from apps I always wipe from the dashboard, which ones I click through. Over time it tunes itself to reduce or stop certain kinds of notifications so that I'm just getting the notifications I'm going to want to see.
Right now it's just the individual apps that control their notifications (the "give them everything" controls currently exposed don't really allow us to manage the deluge in the right ways). This could provide a better way to control all that.
Yeah, I agree, and it won't work without this. Which means some sort of NLP so that an app has the ability to separate the things it's attempting to show through some sort of categorization.
You may be reading/interpreting this wrong - the wrapper gives users the option to explicitly say they're not interested in X, Y or Z.
Assuming that developers are required to qualify their presentation with some sort of context, ie "New movies about cowboys" or "Little League scores in Atlanta, GA" it will defer to the user's choices as it does now.
There is always room for abuse, but unlike spam, the application knows the source, so it's easy to cut the head off.
Also for Now developers, pushing a card to a user is only the intent for that user to get a card (and the intent to show it in certain contexts, like on their commute, at work, leisure time and location based). There is still the Now API black box between you and the end user (plus the end user can just ignore all cards from you if they want with a single swipe).
The bigger problem really was that content in the cards sent then gets fed into the Now content "context" algorithm. So for example if you receive content from something about recipes you might find you get spammed with information about restaurants around you at lunch times for example. It really doesn't all feel that great in some regards.
But isn't this iterative learning? The first time you use Google Now you generally have some very weak recommendations, but as you filter the results (by adding apps, expressly saying 'yes' or 'no' to cards), it gets better.
By and large there's a lot of ML behind the scenes, but it's also supervised learning. It gets better with more data.
If they could let app developers decide on which notifications appear on the home screen, I wouldn't need automatic anything.
Take Llama for example. Llama manages some settings on my phone, but the only way to keep it from being killed is to display a permanent notification. This has the added benefit of it being easy to see which Location I am at by swiping down the notification bar, but I never need this information on the home screen.
Do you forget where you are? (I'm kidding, but maybe you could explain what information the notification is really providing you, obviously not as little as my joke implies).
Also, couldn't that app be using some sort of intent? There seem to be a couple of options, and I wouldn't think the settings need to be adjusted instantly.
"About to"? I read a lot of hopes and aspirations, but nothing as imminent as "about to".
Emphasis mine:
"Aparna Chennapragada...announced at SXSW that the service EVENTUALLY will open its API to all app developers."
"A Google spokesperson told WIRED there IS NO TIMETABLE for opening the API to all developers, but that the company “plans to add more cards and open the API to developers over time.”"
According to the OP, there are already 40 apps in the pilot program. Presumably, Google will open the platform to close partners first, and independent developers later.
Sorry to be a pedant, but: I was confused for a moment about what this article was about due to the casing of the title, "An open Google now is about to...", which sounds like Google is becoming "open" and is "now about to..." do something. I wondered, "what about Google being 'open' is going to make Android smart?"
The problem starts on Wired's end, where the title was title-cased in the HTML title, and upper-cased for the in-body header, leaving no trace of the original intended casing, "An open Google Now is about to...". And then when the article was submitted to Hacker News, where we traditionally sentence-case things, the submitter had to do the sentence-casing themselves and overlooked this finer point.
Alas, for if only CSS text-transforms could just magically make title- and sentence-casing work...
title casing (and sentence casing) is one of these problems that is easy for humans to perform on a case by case basis, but hard to solve in an automated and generic way.
Not only is it language dependent (and any solution baked into css needs to work for all languages where it is relevant), and do various publishers have slightly differing rules about it, but it also depends on the meaning, as this example shows. Whether "Now" is part of the "Google Now" name, or works as an adverb influences the casing.
CSS has become quite a bit more complicated these days, but it is still quite far form being sentient.
For me, the title initially read as Google Now being open sourced, and I was eager to read about such a bold but strange move on Google's part. As soon as I started reading the article and realized it was about opening up the API, I lost all interest.
I mean, I do get how good it is that they are opening up the API for third parties, but I was really hoping to read about Google turning around from their recent anti-open-source/anti-open-platform moves and back towards embracing open source again. Oh well.
> Google has 40 apps in a pilot program that’s produced integrations like location-based rewards and ticket codes from Walgreens and Fandango, flight and lodging deals based on recent Kayak and Airbnb activity, and more.
What worries me is that each example they offer is some way to advertise goods and services. I don't need yet another avenue for this kind of crap to be pushed out to me.
Google knows that what you really need Now are coupons for laundry detergent in aisle 5 (when you're in aisle 4 you get cookie coupons), and an ad for a pet-washing service on rainy, muddy days. Ads for taxi services showing up 120 minutes before your flight? There's no limit to what you need Now!
In some ways I like Google Now. It can organize things on my phone utilizing Google's vast knowledge about my activities online.
But the same thing bothers me deeply. Our lives have become subjects to these machine learning algorithms. They feed us meaningless click-baity titles, advertisements and notifications that aren't all that important. That's how their huge business operations roll after all. We've become a generation that subconsciously write to feed the machines, not humans; and there's no easy way out in sight.
Exactly. Dear Google, not that I don't appreciate your efforts but please open source the server side application, let me install in on my VPS and point my phone to it. I'll be happy to start using Google Now then. But don't forget to open source the app too, to be sure that nothing funny is going on inside it.
Everyone else (it seems) complains about how google discontinued Reader.
My biggest loss was google desktop. One of a few brilliant things it did was to pick news to me based on what I had already read (I guess it autodetected RSS feeds in pages I read and used them as input.)
Hopefully this could replace this particular feature.
As much as I appreciate a lot of Google services, including Google Now when I lived for a while in Mountain View and it worked fairly well, my big issue is how I value my time.
I am fighting back a little on information + marketing material being pushed at me. I do some simple things that help: use GMail as a low priority email catch-all that I check just a few times a day; use a personal domain email address for friends and family that I check very frequently; I keep my cellphone turned off while with friends, hiking, coding, and writing.
I recently watched "The Zero Theorem" with my Brother. The scenes of people walking on the street having advertisements pushed at them makes for good science fiction but it is not the lifestyle I want.
It's actually a very useful and powerful Android tool: traffic info, flight info, package tracking, and more automatically collected and updated in a reference pane.
I have an exclusive email address that I use for the things Google Now can track and provide updates: Amazon deliveries, flights, hotels, and car reservations. For each of those, Now is convenient for looking up confirmations, order numbers, contact info, and location.
Regarding traffic directions: I don't need actual directions but it's great to be able to see how traffic looks with a swipe and plan alternate routes when necessary, like when I need to get into downtown San Francisco @ 5:45pm.
There's a few more goodies. Sports score will be updated. Google Now will also know when you're in a new town and offer suggestions for What to Eat nearby.
The main problem is that Now is useless until you can clear out the redundant stuff: places you already know and routes you never take. Worse, it's not clear dismissing those things are considered "yes of course" or "not liked". WiIll be interesting to see how they interpret since it's all recommendation-based.
I actually thought I liked Google Now until I read through these comments. It sort of woke me up to the fact that Google stole iGoogle from us and this is its replacement.
* They could easily drop in the ability for me to subscribe to an RSS feed, but they don't.
* I don't have any way to tell it what I prioritize. Today I scrolled through 10 cards before finding the weather.
* Going into "Customize" -> "Everything Else" has some absolutely laughable questions that it is using to inform itself about my tastes. Some of this cannot be based on my browsing habits.
If they won't give the users any access to configuring a tool for our needs, what sort of warm and fuzzies are we supposed to get that they'll let developers have access? Do I really need ANOTHER notification dock?
I stopped using phones a couple of years ago, after working on them for awhile (mostly video stuff, some carrier billing - in the days when that was possible, before the Androids stopped dreaming of electric settlement due to aggressive Google policymaking) and concluding I really didn't like the privacy implications.
However, circa start of the year I visited a friend who works for a major cellular carrier in Australia. He showed me the latest greatest phone (honestly can't recall which, but Android-based) and was enormously proud to show me how the device had learned precisely how far it was for him to walk to work and how far to his favourite restaurant.
Gee, I thought. It's figured out precisely the least useful stuff you're most likely to know anyway, and you're not only looking at the device to validate this (ie. unlearning this trivial information) but actually sharing it with Google and anyone who steals/borrows/hacks your phone. Where's the plus side?
This Google Now stuff looks like more of the same: thinly veiled marketing schmick on what essentially amounts to a filtered correlation of all of your personal habits (real and virtual), wants and plans. A big privacy no-no, NSA wet dream, desperately searching for a legitimate application.
78 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadSo far Google Now has only been Google using up my battery to tell me that my way home, will still take me 20 minutes by car, despite me having exclusively used the subway since before I signed up for Google apps. The one thing it does, it does wrong. That's a 100% failure-rate.
I don't know how much it has cost Google, but so far I would definitely rate it not worth it.
[0]http://www.droid-life.com/2013/02/13/new-google-now-allows-y...
So every search engine gives me links to buy a ticket or check a flight, when I search for keywords about aeronautics. Want to find a motherboard spec sheet? Get 100 links to where to buy motherboards. And guess what I see when I search for mathematical models?
I had to ride a shuttle between campus and an offsite parking lot for about 8 months while construction was going on at work. The shuttle actually drove a couple of miles past where it'd make sense to head toward my apartment and then I'd have to loop back around in a pretty non-obvious way when I got to my car.
Google Now figured this out within a couple of weeks of when I started riding the shuttle and would show my route accordingly. I was actually kind of shocked it managed that without any active input on my end.
Short version being, it does seem be be a matter of development focus if the by-car side of things is that good.
This is very city and country-dependent. In Europe, car commuters aren't an overwhelming majority. The figure for the UK is 57% commuting by car.
edit: Oh, apparently
> Note: Some features, such as Gmail Now cards, aren't available when using Google Now with a Google Apps account.
Well, that's just useless.
AFAIK in my city, public transport authorities signed some kind of exclusivity deal with a route-planning startup, and they don't give bus/tram timetables to Google. Maybe where you live there is a similar deal?
The startup itself is not that bad, but having this data available in Google Maps and Google now would be strictly better. I've experienced this in Hanover once and I know how cool it is.
A company can't just expect that the data holders will blindly comply with them because the result would be an improvement over the current solution.
I'm also confused what your point is. TeMPOraL expressed an opinion but having this data available in Google Maps and Google now would be strictly better.
That isn't a forceful argument that cities must comply with the demands of Google, but you seem to be answering it as if it were.
Using your words, it's a lamentation that Google provides no service at all.
Public entities ow the data to nobody and especially not to companies.
For sure, it would be great if city administrations and public entities did have some kind of API but the overhead would be just too big to justify the cost.
Having commercial partners for those APIs would be one way to fund it but I don't think that it would be a sustainable model world-wide.
(especially if we are talking about entities that receive government funding or offer a public service under some limited license)
I think my attitude is widespread:
https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/
https://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicF...
That's a Google effort, but it is pragmatic, it opens the data for more than just Google.
But as a developer I know how quickly the technologies and developer needs change. There are often threads on the front page of HN and /r/programming about the technology turnover being too quick. From this practical point of view I find it difficult to see how an public entity could justify funding for stuff like this.
Also using companies like Google as an example for data-openness is not the best argument. API bait-and-switches are just too common these days.
As far as the spending, the public entity already has to have some sort of record of their scheduling. The justification for sharing it is simply that making things easier to use increases use of them. Perhaps that isn't the case, but it shouldn't take months of time to set up a system to dump an existing database, so for systems with thousands of users it should not be a significant expense.
For those of us living in the EU, there even are multiple directives mandating it for various kinds of public entities and data.
It is slowly getting better in detecting bicycle use, though.
Suggestion: Go into the google app on your phone, tap the menu button and tap Customize==>Everything else==>How do you Usually Get around? Set to Public Transit and save. Done.
If you're using Lollipop, just above the travel time card there should be a small ellipsis icon (...) where you can change your preferred travel method to biking, driving, walking, public transit or tell it you don't care about travel times at all. It even lets you configure preferred routes if you take PT.
Also, travel time is only one of the features of Google Now, it can tell you current weather, nearby dining and entertainment, upcoming appointments, travel information such as flight data for trips it has learned about through gmail or your calendar.
I'm not saying Google Now is great and that you should use it, whether or not it has enough value is completely dependent on your use-case. But if you're having a 100% failure rate, it's likely due to configuration or exclusivity agreements as mentioned in other comments. (Unless your phone isn't running Lollipop which would be a completely different conversation)
At least I always know how far I am away from a Big Mac.
I think the work identification routine is probably pretty simple. Determine home by where the phone spends a long stasis/charging period, likely overnight, and then find the most common recurring location that visited during the day during weekdays over a prior period. It's probably good for the vast majority of people.
It appears that it doesn't understand that I could possibly work from home and went to lunch that one day and its heuristics are broken in some way.
I've turned it off now and I'm happy (plus I get another hour or so out of the battery)
From there, you can click "Customize" which allows you to update your card preferences.
In your case you'd want to update the work location under "Places". Tap your work place, tap the address and update it with any place you are interested in travelling to on a daily basis. (This is actually the "Daily Commute" location, it's just automatically labelled as work) Alternatively, you could just relabel it from "Work" to "McDonalds" and then you'd at least overcome the 100% failure rate issue.
This is Customize menu is also where you can give Now your local cable provider for TV schedules, sports teams and stocks for tracking and aggregated access to all your general preferences for Now as well.
I've set my work address to home. The following morning it tells me I have a 23 minute commute to McDonalds again.
I'm going to reset the device tonight.
I remain without a Gmail account, all of my email passes through several Google Apps accounts. Google Now has been a tease for years... it appears to offer the features I desire, but none of them are available to me.
Email scanning for flight information, appointments, etc... just doesn't happen.
I keep Google Now enabled, but pretty much all it can tell me is where I am, and what the weather is like. But this isn't that useful. I want the rest.
Wouldn't this face the same challenges as managing an e-mail account to prevent too much spam/noise? Or is there some way Google Now scales with number of apps that cuts spam down? It seems like the more apps it supports, Google Now would have to be increasingly strict on what apps are allowed to push to the single wrapper.
As in, Now learns what app's announcements or what kind of announcements from apps I always wipe from the dashboard, which ones I click through. Over time it tunes itself to reduce or stop certain kinds of notifications so that I'm just getting the notifications I'm going to want to see.
Right now it's just the individual apps that control their notifications (the "give them everything" controls currently exposed don't really allow us to manage the deluge in the right ways). This could provide a better way to control all that.
Assuming that developers are required to qualify their presentation with some sort of context, ie "New movies about cowboys" or "Little League scores in Atlanta, GA" it will defer to the user's choices as it does now.
There is always room for abuse, but unlike spam, the application knows the source, so it's easy to cut the head off.
The bigger problem really was that content in the cards sent then gets fed into the Now content "context" algorithm. So for example if you receive content from something about recipes you might find you get spammed with information about restaurants around you at lunch times for example. It really doesn't all feel that great in some regards.
By and large there's a lot of ML behind the scenes, but it's also supervised learning. It gets better with more data.
Take Llama for example. Llama manages some settings on my phone, but the only way to keep it from being killed is to display a permanent notification. This has the added benefit of it being easy to see which Location I am at by swiping down the notification bar, but I never need this information on the home screen.
Also, couldn't that app be using some sort of intent? There seem to be a couple of options, and I wouldn't think the settings need to be adjusted instantly.
Emphasis mine:
"Aparna Chennapragada...announced at SXSW that the service EVENTUALLY will open its API to all app developers."
"A Google spokesperson told WIRED there IS NO TIMETABLE for opening the API to all developers, but that the company “plans to add more cards and open the API to developers over time.”"
The problem starts on Wired's end, where the title was title-cased in the HTML title, and upper-cased for the in-body header, leaving no trace of the original intended casing, "An open Google Now is about to...". And then when the article was submitted to Hacker News, where we traditionally sentence-case things, the submitter had to do the sentence-casing themselves and overlooked this finer point.
Alas, for if only CSS text-transforms could just magically make title- and sentence-casing work...
Not only is it language dependent (and any solution baked into css needs to work for all languages where it is relevant), and do various publishers have slightly differing rules about it, but it also depends on the meaning, as this example shows. Whether "Now" is part of the "Google Now" name, or works as an adverb influences the casing.
CSS has become quite a bit more complicated these days, but it is still quite far form being sentient.
TL;DR: Proper title casing is AI-complete
Please s/now/Now the title
I mean, I do get how good it is that they are opening up the API for third parties, but I was really hoping to read about Google turning around from their recent anti-open-source/anti-open-platform moves and back towards embracing open source again. Oh well.
What worries me is that each example they offer is some way to advertise goods and services. I don't need yet another avenue for this kind of crap to be pushed out to me.
Give us the API, Google. I'll happily write a Hacker News integration (as someone will most likely beat me to Github one).
The future is awesome!
But the same thing bothers me deeply. Our lives have become subjects to these machine learning algorithms. They feed us meaningless click-baity titles, advertisements and notifications that aren't all that important. That's how their huge business operations roll after all. We've become a generation that subconsciously write to feed the machines, not humans; and there's no easy way out in sight.
The days where Google supported an open Android system are gone, gone, gone.
My biggest loss was google desktop. One of a few brilliant things it did was to pick news to me based on what I had already read (I guess it autodetected RSS feeds in pages I read and used them as input.)
Hopefully this could replace this particular feature.
I am fighting back a little on information + marketing material being pushed at me. I do some simple things that help: use GMail as a low priority email catch-all that I check just a few times a day; use a personal domain email address for friends and family that I check very frequently; I keep my cellphone turned off while with friends, hiking, coding, and writing.
I recently watched "The Zero Theorem" with my Brother. The scenes of people walking on the street having advertisements pushed at them makes for good science fiction but it is not the lifestyle I want.
Regarding traffic directions: I don't need actual directions but it's great to be able to see how traffic looks with a swipe and plan alternate routes when necessary, like when I need to get into downtown San Francisco @ 5:45pm.
There's a few more goodies. Sports score will be updated. Google Now will also know when you're in a new town and offer suggestions for What to Eat nearby.
The main problem is that Now is useless until you can clear out the redundant stuff: places you already know and routes you never take. Worse, it's not clear dismissing those things are considered "yes of course" or "not liked". WiIll be interesting to see how they interpret since it's all recommendation-based.
* They could easily drop in the ability for me to subscribe to an RSS feed, but they don't. * I don't have any way to tell it what I prioritize. Today I scrolled through 10 cards before finding the weather. * Going into "Customize" -> "Everything Else" has some absolutely laughable questions that it is using to inform itself about my tastes. Some of this cannot be based on my browsing habits.
If they won't give the users any access to configuring a tool for our needs, what sort of warm and fuzzies are we supposed to get that they'll let developers have access? Do I really need ANOTHER notification dock?
However, circa start of the year I visited a friend who works for a major cellular carrier in Australia. He showed me the latest greatest phone (honestly can't recall which, but Android-based) and was enormously proud to show me how the device had learned precisely how far it was for him to walk to work and how far to his favourite restaurant.
Gee, I thought. It's figured out precisely the least useful stuff you're most likely to know anyway, and you're not only looking at the device to validate this (ie. unlearning this trivial information) but actually sharing it with Google and anyone who steals/borrows/hacks your phone. Where's the plus side?
This Google Now stuff looks like more of the same: thinly veiled marketing schmick on what essentially amounts to a filtered correlation of all of your personal habits (real and virtual), wants and plans. A big privacy no-no, NSA wet dream, desperately searching for a legitimate application.