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I'm Drew Breunig and I obsess about technology, media, language, and culture. I live in New York, studied anthropology, and work in advertising technology.

These are reactions to things I feel are important.

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Google Me

To be a fly on the wall at Google Me meetings… Listening to engineers try to reverse engineer people into an easily searchable, sortable form.

Here’s what I how I imagine the project has progressed:

  1. A worker realized that Google knows most everything about all of us anyway and organized personal data into a automatically generated profile.
  2. A team was tasked to turn this into a product. They set out to create an ‘Auto-Facebook’: sign in, confirm which of the individuals with your name is actually you, and all your information is automatically pulled into a profile.
  3. Lots of people test this at Google and most love it. They theorize that this product is a Facebook-killer since its profiles are the result of actual action, not user statements (since people are notoriously inaccurate).
  4. The product is pitched to the top brass with the set up, “Don’t you find it difficult to succinctly describe yourself and what you do when asked point blank? …”
  5. Someone realizes that this perhaps even creepier than Street View. His or her concerns are dismissed when someone cites Facebook’s growth despite their privacy issues.

And soon it will launch! 

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  1. dbreunig posted this