At Google a lot was announced but one of the other things which didn’t receive much attention was Google Now…

Its deceptive because whats really going on… But if you read the Tim Burners-Lee piece from years ago, where he outlines the semantic web as masses of agents skimming over a universe of rich data (big data).

The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services (including other agents) become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.

I’m not saying Google just built the first agent. that would be stupid. But what they did do is capture Tim’s vision is a extremely nice way which you can see would be instantly usable for many.

Its easy to see why people write it off as a siri copy but in fact it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Like Perceptive Media, context informs the answer. I’m already seeing this happen on my Google Tasks manager Any.Do. Its looking deep into my calendar, my current phone calls, etc to understand what I want to write a task about. Leo Laporte said Now was creepy but to be honest, if it can truly help me so I don’t need to clog my mind with alternative directions, will I be able to make my appointments, etc. Then I got to say personally thats a good thing.