Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Devil’s Fortune Cookies!

GooglePhone
Today I found another Easter egg (or fortune cookie) from Google. I logged into one of my GMail accounts and the thing popped out (that's what she said). I promptly made a phone call and it worked. I got a call from 760-XXX-XXXX and it was free (just 0.06$ for India which is competitive).
When I opened Picasa I found a grid of face photos under “Unnamed”…Google was prompting me to put names to about a 1000+ faces that they had cropped from photos we upload to Picasa. I guess it will make searching easier (and in many cases obnoxious)
I am a Google fan for providing all these conveniences for free. Sometimes though, I wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares of Eric Schmidt showing me the EULA that says I sold my soul…and now he is here to claim it!

1 comment:

Anirudha said...

Google asking people to identify 'unnamed' pictures?!? This is nothing short of devilish genius at work! Google has bypassed all the development effort of building face-recognition software, the complex process of merging different views of the same face, and another complex process of attaching names. Remember 'Galaxy Zoo'? They asked volunteers to classify galaxies for them, and got a pretty decent response. I am sure hordes of people will fall over themselves to put names to faces for Google - imagine having such massive processing power at your disposal, and not having to program it. Or pay for it.
I don't want even to speculate about what Google is planning to do with this database - I am too scared!