12:55:00
What Google just announced
at its IO conference is a bombshell for the future of the company. For years
the search giant has witnessed the chipping away of its core product — search —
due to the rise of mobile applications and their siloed-off experiences.
Users are engaging more
and more with programs that have no attachment or often need for search on the
broad web, and as a result Google's position as the owner of our habits,
interests, and needs on the internet has looked increasingly at risk.
Google might have just
changed its trajectory.
The company demoed a new
feature of its Android OS which allows its Now service (a dashboard of
notifications focused on your life and interests) to plug in as a layer
that essentially hovers above any app running on your phone or tablet.
Activated by the home
button, it's always there.
This means that you can
get contextual search information around almost anything you're doing, provided
there is text and data that Google can pull from the app itself.
And the best part is that
developers won't have to make any changes to their existing software to allow
the new service — dubbed Now on Tap — to bring search and context into the
user's view.
For instance, while
listening to music in Spotify you can search for more info on an artist, or if
you're talking about a restaurant in WhatsApp, Google can pull up data on the
place and even help you make reservations.
And this is not a feature
of the app itself, rather a helper that lives inside of the entire
operating system.
This is a major move for
two reasons.
The first is that it
really brings Google back to a place of dominance as the glue that holds your
digital life together.
The web has thrived and
grown in no small part because of Google's ability to track, organize, and
understand all of its disparate pieces.
Now it's able to do the
same thing with every app running on your phone.
It allows Google to get
back into the search game by speaking the common language of apps.
It gives the company a
second life with access to user behavior and needs.
But secondly, it starts to
show how Google can be an interconnecting layer between the apps themselves — a
kind of neutral staging ground between one action and another.
This is a sea-change for
how we use our mobile devices and how mobile apps interact with one another.
Currently, we use
OS-defined tools which let apps interact with each other (with rules
defined by the OS-makers, not developers).
But imagine if
developers didn't have to think about how their work connects to the rest of
your world?
Imagine if Now on Tap is
aware enough of the core functions of those apps that it can predict what you'd
most likely want to do with them, and then execute on those needs?
That's the ultimate promise of Now on Tap — and it's a game changing one.
However, the technology
has its limits.
There's no chance a
service like this will ever make its way to Apple's iOS given the closed nature
of the operating system (and the fact that Apple will undoubtedly take a stab
at the same concept).
And Google also has to
prove that this kind of natural language processing can work effectively enough
to live up to the company's promise of a seamless experience.
But if the service is as
impressive as what Google just showed off on stage in San
Francisco, there's a whole new world ahead of us for our devices. One
that's more connected than ever.
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