quarantine 'em

it existed for like fifteen minutes between Orkut but before Google+, and had the wildest features like your profile image had to be smiling. "No, wider," it would say. Sometimes it would just accept a frowning image and modify it to be smiling

Sometimes it would fill in personal details automatically? Hair colour, occupation. The weirdest one was date of birth because it was always really close to being accurate, but off by a few days

and suggest familial relationships with other users you'd never heard of before. "We think this person: <some dark indistinct apparition> is your father"

they did this thing where if you gave it access to your emails it would scan them and figure out which of your contacts had died, and then silently create profiles for them these were people who died before Google People launched?? And they'd show up in searches

nobody ever figured the follower system out. you couldn't "follow" other people, but apparently other people could "watch" you? but nobody ever found the "watch" button

everybody had like a dozen people "watching" them, all complete strangers with huge grinning profile pictures. There was always this one guy with the WEIRDEST face After a while I realised that people were just using that face as their profile picture, like an in-joke

well I thought it was an in-joke

Google People would constantly highlight blank areas on your photos like there was a person there and say "Someone you know?"