For those of you who are Google Now fans, Gary Illyes from Google said they are wanting to add third-party cards into Google Now.

We do see cards that are considered third party, primarily extracted from emails with the appropriate markup, such as the ones we see for flight details, hotel reservations and package shipping information.  But allowing third parties to have their own cards would be really good.

I suspect there would need to be a way to potentially control spam – it would get annoying very quickly to constantly see a card for a company pop up for sending a daily newsletter, unless Google knows the user engages with it regularly.  And spammers would be sure to try and exploit it, in order to get third party cards in front of the most users.

But it certainly has some very useful applications.  Maybe someone wants to see a daily recipe that gets added to a site every morning, or even a card for a Facebook page notification for a group – I could see how something like seeing a card for the “Daily Puppy” would be pretty popular.

For businesses, it could definitely open up a whole new targeted opportunity, depending on how Google implements and manages it.

This will definitely be something to watch for and see how it evolves.  I am a huge fan of Google Now (on iOS, no less) and can’t wait to see what they do with it.