It laid out a course for making apps obsolete and getting users back onto the web, where Google is master.

Huh. Cultural hegemony through digital circus.

but also interesting things like when are they busy, when are they open, and what are you likely to need when you’re there.

Facebook made the same claims about its ads.

It goes beyond pure information, too; you can play Pandora stations in Google Now, or order groceries from Instacart.

Wrapping wrappers with wrapper wrappers.

The marquee new Google Now feature is Now on Tap, which allows developers to integrate the service’s contextual brilliance into their own offerings.

I can't even get my partner to call me brilliant. I am a live, living, human that is the only one that can find the recycling bin in this household. I do it even without using Google!

These reads like Google is making a play for web-middle-ware whose main reason to exist is to insert itself into everyone's TCP/IP stack for demographic logging.

I'm really excited about this. Thanks for including klein's old submission as well, that's a really enjoyable read. Ubuntu's Unity 8 is another take on this, with its scopes.

I'd prefer it if the only apps I had on my phone were rss/podcast, email, browser, ereader, camera, maps, music, and dialer/sms/whatever. I would really prefer that everything else I use be in the browser. I need a bit more on my laptop/desktop for writing, and various CLI applications (and hopefully my phone and my computer will be the same machine before too long). With that in mind, it feels to me like these really basic applications should be baked into the operating system more than they are now, so they look like the sort of interfaces described in the intercom.io post. The key is that the content from the applications bubbles up into the common interface.

Now that I'm thinking about it, in a way, this is why I enjoy using the command line more than graphical interfaces for a lot of purposes.

EDIT: this also reminded me of something I was thinking of a few months ago. I wish email would be treated more like a cross-platform notification system. I know it already is that, but I think it should look more like native applications currently do on mobile OSs, with actionable buttons that take me directly to the relevant webpage, app, etc., without having to go into the email app to see a full message. If it looked exactly like what Android notifications currently look like, I think that'd be perfect. It should be less about communication, more about notification. I was hoping Mozilla would push something like this with Firefox OS, but it doesn't look like they are.

I don't like the idea of relying on one app (or a single non-app entity) for everything. Last night my girlfriend suggested we try a restaurant she had heard of. I looked it up on Google Maps and was informed that the restaurant was closed. A quick check to the restaurant's website showed that this was incorrect, and not by a small margin. Google listed the closing time as 4pm when in reality they served food until midnight!

This is far from the first time I've experienced this, and each time I have attempted to give feedback both to the restaurant and to Google. In every case, Google has ignored the feedback. In several instances the restaurant owners said they had attempted to correct the error as well but without success. What good is a single "all knowing" app if it isn't always right and difficult to change? It calls into question the accuracy of other information I rely on Google for, such as up-to-date suggested driving routes, weather forecasts, flight status, etc. Sure I know how to verify these things, but then what's the point of Google?

I like Google Now a lot, and get a lot of use out of it. When you've got the whole googlesphere working for you, it all interfaces pretty smoothly. Every morning I get the commute time and traffic report to my office (School when I was going to school) without having to search for it. The specials for restaurants I've rated highly pop up at appropriate times, and the newsfeed it provides is usually more on-topic for things I actually care about than reddit, certainly facebook, and several other aggregators. It integrates with the new google inbox really well, generating events for meetings and such in a timely manner.

I decided a long time ago that in the world we find ourselves in, your information is going to be used, as much as you try to protect your privacy, so why not make it work for you as well as against you? I've appointed Google the steward of my digital self, and i'll continue to do so until they renege on their motto 'Don't be evil.'