Pragmatic Source: From the Department of Kicking Google While It's Down

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Google has come under fire for privacy and other issues in Google + of late, but now Microsoft is increasing the heat and pointing out how creepy GMail's contextual ads are.

By Amy Vernon on Thu, 07/28/11 - 2:14pm.

"Well, sometimes when a person loves their gmail very, very much, the two get together and an ad is born." And with that quote, Microsoft hurls a big, fat grenade at Google for its contextual ads in Gmail.

At its sales conference last week, Microsoft showed attendees this video of "GMail man," the mailman who skims your messages and offers unsolicited advice and products in response. The video was posted to YouTube by a reporter who received it from someone who attended the conference.

Of course, the entire point of this video isn't so much out of concern for the public as it is to pimp out its new Office 365 suite, meant to compete directly with Google Apps. But who among us hasn't been horrified or just even slightly creeped out by some of the contextual ads served up by Google?

Whether you love Google or anxiously await all Microsoft updates, you've gotta admit the video is pretty spot-on. What's the weirdest or creepiest contextual ad you've seen on Gmail?

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About Pragmatic Source

After nearly 20 years as a professional journalist for large and small daily newspapers in Florida, Arizona and New York, Amy was part of the Great Newspaper Culling of 2008. That was a good thing. Now, Amy writes for a variety of websites, including NetworkWorld, Discovery's Parentables and Soshable and consults with a variety of sites on their social media strategy.

She also has created the first - and only - bacon news aggregator on the Internet, Bacon Queen and has altogether too many Tumblogs. Amy is the top female user of all time on Digg.com and spends altogether too much time on the computer. You can follow her on Twitter and find more out about her on her website.