jennings rampage

Experiment… of evil!

So, the other day I was playing around with my shiny new totally gloatable Gmail account, trading messages with Katy, when I couldn’t help but notice that the “oh my heavens the world is going to end” automatic ad-placer set this next to the message:

Amusing. It inspired me to ask my friends to have normal conversations with me over e-mail, just so I could see what ads Google’s magic advertisement brain would include. I didn’t tell my friends why I wanted to have these conversations, because my friends are smartasses and would try to manipulate the system, and I wanted this to be totally scientific and whatnot.

Ethan was the first to take the bait, and we talked mostly about his upcoming move and his need for furniture. Google was all over that shit:

Siegel, certain I was tricking him somehow, jotted off a brief note lamenting the smell of New York in the summer after it rains. Well, Google’s here to help:

Greg e-mailed me about, wait for it, poker. Google shared its opinion:

CeCe was all over the place — movies she had seen, how busy her upcoming semester was to be, thoughts on improv, how she secretly wants to date me. Google… got a little confused, I guess:

I had a few more conversations — Erik wrote to talk about old age and quality of life, Kit wrote to talk about the low-carb cookie he had at Subway (which he promptly compared to the Nazis for some reason), Laine asked if a letter she was expecting was delivered to my house, Melanie just assumed I was gloating about my new e-mail account and wrote nothing of substance. No ads showed up for any of it, and I was sad.

Katy wrote to ask me what I was up to with this whole conversation thing, and I told her about my curiosity, lamenting that the results weren’t quite as interesting or hilarious as I had hoped. I believe I included the sentence “I am interested in refinancing my mortgage and growing my penis.” Google took the hint:

While my original intent was to have my friends write to me for my own entertainment, I had a great time writing back to everyone and seeing what people would write about when I simply asked them to write. Thanks for that, guys. And Lisa, congratulations on not falling for my evil evil trick.