Google will eventually open the Google Now API to app developers

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.

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.

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.”"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The days where Google supported an open Android system are gone, gone, gone.

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...