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Google Adds New Notification Center To Chrome Code

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18 pointsJOfferijns8 comments

Am I the only one who doesn't think Google Now is the best thing ever? I've never seen anything useful in it. What do you use it for?

I haven't really experienced much with it. Having said that, I don't have a busy life :)

One day, however, my wife was traveling and the hotel reservation had been sent to my email address. Google Now had a card that said something along the lines of "Hey, don't forget you're checking in to such and such a place tonight!" and also showed a map, with the route from my current location to the hotel.

I thought that was cool, and I daresay if I had more of that (maybe parcel tracking, I don't know) I think it would be fun.

The other problem is that things such as public transit and traffic stats are non-existent were I am. That would be useful, too, I could imagine...

TL;DR: I'm boring and I live in a boring place. Therefore, my Google Now is pretty boring?

the down side is that they not only (can) know everything about you, but they actively scan and put it together.

Personally, I am skipping it, ads and being sold to the higher bidder advertiser aren't that far. Not to mention the fact that Google has everything about your life already extracted and ready for the local police, FBI, divorce lawyer or whatever

I think that's a downside to GMail / using Google Accounts... not really a downside to Google Now. Not saying it's not a problem, but just that it is a problem whether or not they aggregate that information for me.

Let me give you one example that felt like magic. I was taking a trip to New York on business. At 4pm I come off the train at Penn Station and pull out my phone to look up the hotel confirmation I got two weeks before so I can get directions. When I turned it on, a Google Now card was there saying "Carlton Hotel, you're checking in today." I click it and up come directions.

Now, I performed absolutely NO action to make that happen. I just had a confirmation by email that it had picked up. Now maybe that's creepy to some people but it saved me a lot of fiddling around with the phone to find the confirmation and it knew exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it. Isn't that what computers are supposed to do for us?

That seems great but how do you get it to show you a notification like that? The only way for me to see the cards is to manually go into Google Search and scroll down to them.

I can only assume you haven't used it yet, then. Some examples (I live in NYC):

Whenever I am not at home, Google Now preloads what subway station I should head to and how long it'll take me to get home, and updates as I move around.

It tells me when to leave home to make it to appointments: "leave now for lunch with Dave".

It scans my Gmail to bring up boarding details for every flight I take, and hotel details for every booking I made. It also brings in package tracking, so as soon as I order something from Amazon, I can track its status to my door.

And that's just getting started.

I live in a small town in a small country, never fly anywhere, never book any hotels and never put anything in my Google Calendar so that may be a reason I don't get anything I guess. It does seem good however for people like you.

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