The Future is Passive

What if I told you an iPhone app had only a sign-up process and then a single, non-interactive screen?  Kinda weird, right? Well here ya go:

I haven’t used the app, Highlight, so I don’t have an opinion on it, but I’m intrigued by the concept of a useful app I don’t need to use.

Siri, in essence, gets to this point.  Talking is easier than tapping; it’s almost like you’re not querying a machine. 

Similarly, foursquare’s Radar feature, which notifies you when you’re near a place on one of your Lists, reduces the need to do anything to benefit from your app.

One of Yelp’s problems is how much work extracting utility requires.  This is why Google acquired a company that just tells you where to eat.  If they can marry that with Zagat’s data, delizioso! 

As companies acquire more of our data, they will be able to serve us information with minimal effort on our part. That’s wonderful: the joy might be in the journey or it might be in the destination, but it certainly isn’t in slogging through clunky services like Yelp.