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Friday, August 19, 2011

Gmail ads

When I got Gmail a while back (thanks for the invitation, Chris!), I was a little creeped out by how Google trawled through my mail to figure out what ads to present. I hadn't had a lot of experience with the company's business model, and still had an old-fashioned notion that Google had to have some way of making money that didn't depend on exploiting me. Ah, to be innocent again.

Today, the ads were pretty much irrelevant to anything I've emailed about in months, if ever. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Does Google no longer care enough about me to bother keyword-searching my in-box? If so, I'm a little hurt. Yo, Google, are you saying I'm not enough of a consumer to bother targeting? (I'm probably not, but even exploitation is a form of attention, and everyone needs attention....)

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