While the Google Glass Explorer competition debacle drags on, and thousands of people go up in arms over Google’s seemingly random choices for winners of its “#ifihadglass” gig on Twitter and Google+, a Stanford CS Ph.D student by the name of Andrej Karpathy put together some data in an attempt to show what Google’s overall plan for this whole thing might have been. As it turns out, Google might have had a clear criteria for choosing competition winners after all.
Based on the data gathered by Karpathy after going through the profiles of all the competition winners on Twitter (by using Python and a little hackery), Google apparently chose mostly celebrities and famous Twitter personalities to win in its competition. These include actor Patrick J. Adams, R&B singer Brandy, and TV host Adam Savage. It’s also clear that an overwhelming majority of the winners had hundreds, if not thousands of followers on Twitter. This is thought to be a clear indication of what Google used for its winner selection process.
When it was revealed that a number of the winners of Google’s “#ifihadglass” competition didn’t deserve to win at all — through either failing to read the competition’s rules or simply demonstrating a clear lack of will to even participate in the first place — many were outraged. A lot of them had submitted entries to compete for the chance to try out Google Glass as well.
Google recently announced that it will rescind some of its Google Glass offers because of the controversy surrounding its #ifihadglass competition. The question now is, will the company own up to what the hard evidence here says, and talk about why it did what it did in selecting the “winners” of its contest? If it does, then it just might be fun to watch.