Counselor Troi's New Job!

"I sense that your caller is... very... upset with you."

A new program analyzes your voicemessage and texts the receipient with the state of your emotions. As always, my emotions are mixed. While I'd probably like to know whether or not a friend is sucicidal so that I could help them, I'm not sure I'd like my friends to know how *I'm* feeling. I also wonder how easy it would be to trick the program, and whether people would spend more time trying to trick it than communicating with the person they are leaving the message for.

I keep thinking about gmail. Gmail runs your email text through a program to look for keywords that trigger content-specific ads. It's very clever, because I usually do look at the ad links just to see what comes up. But then, I've also exchanged mail whose sole purpose was to see what ads it would trigger. Usually we'd end up confusing the poor thing and having no links at all. (Oh, and my favorite link? When I was exchanging information and opinions about the Ohio vote irregularites, off to the side was a link titled "Buy republican votes on eBay." Really.)