The 'aha' moment for me was when I was visiting New York City: A few hours after my arrival, it told me that a favorite musician of mine was going to perform at a venue close to my location. I would have never known if I didn't have the service.
I'm guessing they knew I liked that artist because of my youtube history (my phone doesn't contain any music). That's cool with me. Oh and if they want to show me an ad for his latest album, instead of the latest One Direction single, I'm cool with that too.
Lots of cynicism/astroturfing towards Google. Maybe they were simply giving away their share of the pie to other, smaller businesses? It's not like there's a shortage of RSS readers out there; it's kind of a trivial thing to build.
The turnoff switch for Reader is an inflection point for Google towards Microsoftization; where they new product launches will be skeptically seen by hackers, and geeks.
I went to my phone, and did a Google spring cleanup yesterday, by deleting all the stuff I didn't use, and thought Google would see a future;
That is good for startups, they may attack Google product segments with ease, and we shall all PR for them and enjoy using them.
No, the de-standardizing of Google Calendar is Microsoftization.
1. Release something that's compatible with another popular thing.
2. Build up a huge following.
3. Remove the compatibility.
4. ???
5. Profit!
It's the same thing that happened with NT and OS/2 compatibility. I'm not sure if Excel can still deal with Lotus files, but Excel got popular because of its Lotus compatibility.
Increases appeal of Android devices and provides another advertising opportunity ("find place to eat" -> bam! hyperlocal recommendation. Restaurants would pay significant amounts of money for that type of targeted advertising)
The parent observation is really on the money. Hyperlocal recommendations are very interesting, but _paid_ recommendations are a potential gold mine that I think people are only now starting to catch on to.
What I find particularly interesting about it is the potential to produce genuinely relevant advertising. As a simple example, imagine I ask my smartphone where I can find the nearest fast food joint and it tells me there is a McDonald's around the corner. It might also serve an ad that says there is a Burger King one block further away and if I go there and show the ad I will get free fries and a drink with my sandwich.
There are some very interesting possibilities here that we have only begun to scratch the surface of.
For things like that, such a service makes complete sense. But for things that I spend real money on, I've already developed a filter in my brain to weed out anything that looks like paid shilling. This is why I stopped using Google Shopping after it went paid-only, and why I skip the first page of Google Search when researching products.
Now if they could make this a social thing, where real, authenticated, non-paid people recommend a good place to eat or get my suit tailored, I would be on board. Sadly, there is no money in that sort of service, as Yelp found out pretty quickly.
I find that even for topics related to money the top hits on Google are all completely useless spam. I was looking for information about companies selling software components and just found a bunch of "sellyourappnow.com" offering Fruit Ninja clones for a few hundred bucks.
For whatever reason businesses that love their margins more than their customers find it's much more convenient to astroturf services like Yelp than to actually provide something worth buying.
And services like Yelp always seem to find that it's more lucrative to extort money from businesses in exchange for reorganizing their ratings.
I'd love to have a way for regular people to recommend things that was invulnerable to astroturfing but I have no idea what it would look like.
Better kill Calendar then. Can't have us mortals organizing our own schedules.
And Google Drive better get rid of folders. Just have a box you drop files on. If you need them back, hopefully you can figure out a search term to find them. But not using any search operators, those are too much like letting you organize.
Isn't that why they're consolidating and trimming the business, to be more focused on that mission statement?
In itself, Reader could fit in (as the article by one of the original developers touched on). But for various reasons they never worked this out, or didn't put enough resources on it. So now they pull the plug. A stupid decision for many reasons, but not necessarily from a purely 'strategic' point of view.
One reason I can think of that they never invested deeply in Reader could be that the subset of people using it actively (geeks, information addicts) just wasn't interesting and broad enough to them.
Or perhaps there wasn't a large enough subset of that subset who work at Google. They don't have a use for it internally so there's no way they can dogfood it.
The issue at hand is whether Google will later determine that the value gained from this new service is worth the cost. Google Reader allowed Google to collect a lot of incremental info on its users (what they were interested in reading) but wasn't worth the maintenance. Google likes to throw spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks, despite how this strategy can negatively impact is users.
I always loved the strategy, and previously it didn't always bother me. When they cancelled Google/Gmail Labs, for example, I didn't like it, but I didn't care enough or rely on it enough to have a problem with it.
Perhaps they just had to learn the lesson that spaghetti that sticks is probably best left in place when it has a rabid fan-base.
I used it on vacation a lot the other week. Just say "Navigate me to x" or "Directions to y" or "Find the nearest z" and you get it right away in Google Maps/Navigation. Probably my favorite non-passive feature of it.
Then when staying at the hotel, it knows I'm staying there and tells me when I'm driving elsewhere how far away I am from it with traffic and how to go back via a notification.
Other times, if you call a place, like to order carryout, it knows you called it by the telephone number and then gives you a notification of how far away that place is and offers directions.
This kind of thing probably works well in major markets. Last time I used google naviation it took me to a vacant lot half a mile from where I wanted to go. Another time it took me on a convoluted route that included cutting through two private apartment parking lots for a destination that turned out to be literally around the corner and down the road from where I started. This is not uncommon in my part of the US (midwest). I don't use navigation anymore, I look at the maps and pick my own routes.
Just to follow up, I've only really used it in metropolitan areas/suburbs and on long trips where I knew the address ahead of time, so I can't comment on accuracy in rural areas or small towns. Guessing it's similar to your situation though if it's an area not as well traveled.
Google Now is the best thing Google have done yet with the vast swathes of information they collect. Right now, Google Now is the reason to use everything Google.
I'm not finding the exact quote right now, but Sergey always wanted Google to be able to interact with the user and suggest things to them automatically. Google Now is a part of that strategy.
