This is an older version of this story, from 2019. Here's the latest version, from 2022.
cripes does anybody remember Google People
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
it existed for like fifteen minutes between Orkut but before Google+, and had the wildest features like your profile image had to be smiling. "No, wider," it would say. Sometimes it would just accept a frowning image and modify it to be smiling
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
Sometimes it would fill in personal details automatically? Hair colour, occupation. The weirdest one was date of birth because it was always really close to being accurate, but off by a few days
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
and suggest familial relationships with other users you'd never heard of before. "We think this person: <some dark indistinct apparition> is your father"
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
they did this thing where if you gave it access to your emails it would scan them and figure out which of your contacts had died, and then silently create profiles for them
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
these were people who died before Google People launched?? And they'd show up in searches
nobody ever figured the follower system out. you couldn't "follow" other people, but apparently other people could "watch" you?
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
but nobody ever found the "watch" button
everybody had like a dozen people "watching" them, all complete strangers with huge grinning profile pictures. There was always this one guy with the WEIRDEST face
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
After a while I realised that people were just using that face as their profile picture, like an in-joke
well I thought it was an in-joke
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
Google People would constantly highlight blank areas on your photos like there was a person there and say "Someone you know?"
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
they shut it down after like six months and the reason was something like they had "found Them"
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
it made all these bizarre choices which I didn't even pick up on until later. I don't generally use emoji so it took me about two months to realise that nobody ever used a smiling emoji. because it didn't have a smiling emoji
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
sad, tearful, angry, etc., not one smiling face
a while after "guessing" your birth date it would "guess" your death date, which was a bit wild, but after comparing notes we worked out that for most people it was just guessing the same date, or a few weeks or months after
— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019
— qntm (@qntm) 22 August 2019
OK so if you remember this thread you may also remember that Google People doesn't show up in the Google Graveyard
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
apparently (according to a Googler) the reason for that is because the project never "died", because internally it was never considered to be "alive" (cont.) https://t.co/XCLKZKSzLY
What's the google graveyard?
— emma, hockey butch (@LlanowarEmma) 11 October 2019
Google has a habit of discontinuing products, so people started maintaining independent listings of all of themhttps://t.co/GLbpbvdeVyhttps://t.co/GG8wSr5EGphttps://t.co/qvLi98zeAf
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
I reset my pw and logged back in to Google People for the first time in 10 (?) years just now and discovered the following:
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
1. 10 years of updates on my account, written by me
2. also 10 years of "updates" for every other person I knew on there!
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
I guess they made some algorithm to simulate continued activity? current hypothesis is that this was an attempt to game their metrics after it was really unpopular
3. INCLUDING PHOTOS
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
4. the algorithm is startlingly good at imitating my writing style for updates at first but it wanders way off topic and starts repeating itself
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
because, you know, it's a bot. like how predictive text challenges always get locked in a loop
(going to stop numbering these) so by the time of present-day updates it's going in psychotic circles talking for thousands of words about "metal" and "low ceilings" and it generally seems to be quite unhappy for a bot
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
I genuinely cannot quite figure out if you're joking and/or writing fiction
— @CoronaCoreanici@mastodon.social (@CoronaCoreanici) 7 September 2019
I suspect this isn't actually a thing but still
it doesn't help that it's absolutely futile to Google for "Google People"
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
Other current theory is that they kept this going as a semi-actual social network which they could experiment on
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
which is actually quite cool because Facebook had that problem where they were doing ethically dubious experiments on their users and, Google People, the users are all screaming mad bots, problem "solved"...?
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
of course it could be that classic "AI" thing where they're actually just woefully underpaid real people writing miserable fake posts in trash conditions
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
whatever's going on this latest auto generated photo of "me" looks pretty angry and like legitimately sick
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
"turn on your monitor" yuk yuk
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
but seriously it's like they used a "radiation sickness" filter. it's actually legit upsetting to look at. no thank you
this rings a bell but it could have been Google Plus https://t.co/f3VhdZ0yHZ
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
— qntm (@qntm) 7 September 2019
basically if this is a dead social network, re-animated to do long-term experiments on, they are evidently not nice fun experiments and the "participants" do not enjoy them
— qntm (@qntm) 8 September 2019
— qntm (@qntm) 8 September 2019
ah yeah all those bizarrely-phrased reminder emails after not logging in for a while
— qntm (@qntm) 8 September 2019
"Don't forget about completing your Person!"https://t.co/cSOnmfkKuw
"Your Person is empty"
— qntm (@qntm) 8 September 2019
"Your Person is lonely"
just say you want more details about my hobbies or whatever, cripes. unsubscribe
I have to confess I was still morbidly curious about this so here are some more preliminary research results
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
research result the first: everybody hated working at/on Google People https://t.co/YlrLQkLau9
apparently the project went through a ridiculous number of directors (10+)
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
my conjecture is that after a while they started moving people sideways onto the project as a like a constructive way to force them to quit
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
(I say that because it looks like a lot of these senior folks just quit tech entirely right after and don't show up again)
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
I mean you've got to have an office in Greenland you can transfer people to, figuratively speaking, right?
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
I'm just kidding Greenland owns. Anyway I'm just hypothesising
the current director (yes there is one) did not respond to direct emails
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
which I suspect may just be due to me being marked as spam (I am not internal to Google, meh
)
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
however! I do have a friend in Google (helped me with the employee data) and I got them to email my questions anonymised [drum roll]
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
and the response was TETCHY. dismissive. I would say crabby almost to the point of being unprofessional
— qntm (@qntm) 10 October 2019
and unfortunately that's it
"go away" in almost as many words. (or possibly "get away", I mean it depends how you interpret it)
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
also very poor typography for a higher-up. rushed
apologies for the extremely poor navigability of this nonsense, I am doing my best.
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
okay that's basically one research result so here's a second one, apparently they support animated GIFs for profile pics now, AMAZING
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
yeah it 100% does *not* work https://t.co/1kn0ezNlDg
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
I've seen this a couple of times, those were both when the Google Person was based on someone who died IRL though https://t.co/2b9Nxsqur5
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
so you can't be immortalized as part of a bizarre machine learning experiment? then what's the point
— world is WATCHING a bun (@elementnumber46) 11 October 2019
well I mean it probably depends if the experiment succeeds
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
well that's just Twitter, am I right? zoosh https://t.co/522Tx03VGZ
— qntm (@qntm) 11 October 2019
finally finding time to get back into this!
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
so I put a manual update in my old Google People account saying just, "test"
the bot which has been autogenerating updates for me for the past 10+ years apparently found this intensely confusing https://t.co/py910VpTcG
(I guess the bot is my "Google Person"?)
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
the bot posted its own update which was the word "test" repeated for four pages
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
then an update which was basically one of its rabid Markov chained madness updates, but with "test test test" mixed in about a hundred times.
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
tentative conclusion: data introduced by me (real human) has a relatively higher "priority" in the update generation algo? "significant"
(that was yesterday) today I posted a new update which was just a textbook social media "here's how my day was"
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
the bot's "response" was, and I quote, "That's not true"
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
Some things to keep in mind here
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
1. yes, my post contained some fake names because I'm done giving real data to Google/etc., so, good call, bot (?)
2. it's not really a "response", it's just another Google People update from "me", under my name. it reads like I'm arguing with myself. I find this weirdly distracting lol
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
the deal with Google People is that there are two of you. there's you, and then there's your Google Person
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
your Google Person is exactly like you except it's made of incomplete data and it can't die
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
the key point here is that ONLY YOU KNOW THIS. Google Person you does not
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
Google Person you thinks it's the only one
Google Person you thinks it's real
I get update emails sometimes from Google People asking me back, you know, the usual, but they're a bit odd and I suspect they're written by my Google Person?
— Duckminster Featherene 🦆 (@batterpunts) 19 October 2019
But I never made an account there
They probably created a shadow profile, Facebook does the same
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
haha "nope"! of course your life sucks and you hate it, you're a poorly correlated kludge of social media activities living in a universe run by Google employees who hate you
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
I'd be mad too
one of the dumber issues Google People had was that it tried to be invite-only while only giving out approximately one free invite, total, to each existing user
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
oof my Person is actually getting quite irate at me. anyway more updates tomorrow
— qntm (@qntm) 19 October 2019
alright good news! it's over. I'm completely done with Google People. I'm out. I escaped https://t.co/dPbwgBcBIp
— qntm (@qntm) 31 October 2019
what
— qntm (@qntm) 31 October 2019
ok that's enough of that. I've put the imposter back inside and deleted the account. thank you to everybody for your support. it was very difficult but I feel a lot better now and that's not true
— qntm (@qntm) 31 October 2019
I mean you've got them and don't show up in they kept to game their metrics after it wander emails
— qntm (@qntm) 31 October 2019
which was a bit wild, but off by almost as a loop
current through a ridiculous experiments on, and Google Graveyard. apparently to Google People who died, realise that it's going the WEIRDEST face as Them. they hurt this dubious thing where if you gave it access to your blank areas
— qntm (@qntm) 31 October 2019
cripes
Discussion (33)
2020-01-02 13:30:51 by qntm:
2020-01-02 16:48:16 by Max:
2020-01-02 18:49:02 by Andrew:
2020-01-05 16:28:35 by Tyler:
2020-01-05 16:39:38 by Glenn:
2020-01-05 20:47:47 by qntm:
2020-01-07 16:38:34 by Twennydet:
2020-01-13 09:15:11 by jonas:
2020-01-13 09:45:03 by qntm:
2020-01-13 14:22:25 by jonas:
2020-01-14 21:29:10 by doge:
2020-01-17 22:49:43 by anon:
2020-01-18 01:10:58 by qntm:
2020-02-01 14:37:54 by Timepoof:
2020-02-16 00:17:59 by Anon:
2020-03-06 23:54:47 by hunterwho:
2020-03-07 00:19:05 by qntm:
2020-03-21 19:24:30 by chris:
2020-08-18 11:40:25 by mamapapaxp:
2020-12-24 16:17:05 by Xtine:
2021-02-28 21:08:07 by Tasha:
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2021-05-05 10:25:39 by FroodOfHoops:
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2021-12-19 17:46:24 by Kronopath:
2022-01-15 15:25:50 by Mameluke:
2022-02-24 14:22:14 by JoeMama1265:
2022-03-28 20:37:40 by Thomas:
2022-03-29 11:17:43 by qntm:
2022-04-06 06:00:07 by anon:
2022-04-06 18:37:30 by qntm: