Thursday, December 19, 2019

"Google treated me like a celebrity for a day—and then realized it made a mistake"

Fast Company:
On Tuesday, I received an email from “Charles,” a product manager from Google offering me access to Cameos on Google, an invitation-only service that allows individuals with a certain level of notoriety to record video answers to questions that people want to know about them. Those self-recorded videos then appear in Google search results. It sounds a little odd, but celebrities actually do this.

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The invitation to this top-flight service was exciting, but also suspicious because I don’t have any “fans,” as the email suggested, and anyone who has a question about me can just send me an email or ping me on Slack. As it turns out, the email actually did come from Google, but alas, my elite status was too good to last. The following day, Google rescinded the invitation, explaining that it had been sent in error