Personalized Content Toes the Line Between Creepy and Cool

Intel's "Museum of Me" compiles your Facebook pictures into a museum exhibit all about you.

The line between cool and creepy is incredibly thin, and yet is one that social media services toe every single day, as they integrate more and more into their users’ lives. It’s a constant battle between providing value to users and keeping from overstepping any boundaries.

That line has recently become even thinner, as API’s allow data to be pulled away from sites and manipulated in any number of ways. The result is content that not only caters to the user, but in fact is focused solely on them.

A great example of this on the “cool” side is Intel’s “Museum of Me”, which pulls in photos, videos, and basic post data from your Facebook account to create a museum exhibit all about you. While wildly narcissistic, it’s a cool use of the data and an interesting way to see your life through the lens of what you put online.

On the infinitely more creepy side (and purposely so) is a site that came out just before Halloween called “Take this lollipop”. Just like the Museum of Me, “Take this lollipop” pulls in photos and information from your Facebook profile. But instead of creating a nice museum exhibit with touching background music, “Take this lollipop” pours your photos right into a short, prerecorded horror film.

For those of you unwilling to offer up your profile to see the video, here’s what happens.

In the video a man in a dilapidated building is sitting in front of a monitor where he “hacks” into your Facebook account.

Take this Lollipop's scary stalker brings your profile with him on his trip to find you.

From there the man trolls through your account, looking at your photos and seemingly gets angrier and angrier, though you are given no reason why. Eventually the man Googles whatever location information you have entered (for instance, my profile simply states my address as ‘Boston, MA’).

The video concludes with a scene of the man driving in his car, presumably to come get you; affixed to the dashboard of his car is a printout of your profile picture.

Believe me when I say that the first time you watch the video you feel uncomfortable. Even with the little personal information I put on Facebook, the incorporation of photos of myself with my girlfriend or my nephew highlighted just how much of my life is online, and just how easy it is to get to it.

The coolness factor of these sites is based on the fact that the content is distinctly personal to me; it doesn’t get more personal than seeing your own face on the screen. But the Pandora’s Box of privacy issues that content like this opens up has the potential to be truly disturbing.
A great example of similar content that toes the line between cool and creepy very well is the “7 Billion & Me” website.

As the world very recently reached a population of 7 billion people, this site highlights for users their place in the context of that many people.

The site has you provide your birthdate, where you live and where you were born, and then generates an infographic illustrating all those who came before you, all those born since you were born, and where in 7 billion people you fit in (for instance, the site informed me that I am the 5,146,335,067th person.)

The content is uniquely personalized and yet impersonal enough to refrain from being creepy. Therein lies the power of such content.

The Internet has brought on a new age of content supply and demand, where the demand is for rich, interesting content that fits in with the individual’s life. For all the writing out there claiming that the web has made communication impersonal, the Internet has also spawned a content revolution wherein the best content is humanized and caters to the individual consumer, and no longer the mass.

Some food for thought: is there such thing as “mass communication” anymore? Even if you aim to reach a large audience, can you survive addressing them as such?