Recommendations and CRM

A month or so ago, I had posted something about Amazon's personalized recommendations going a little wonky. Now, I had heard that gmail (Google's free email accounts) had been giving recommendations as well--these recommendations were based on keywords plucked from emails that gmail users had sent and received. Well, they're not so much recommendations as "personalized" advertising from sponsors of Google's gmail. So I had heard that there were some problems with this as well, and obviously it should be so. I mean, when I write an email to someone, I'm not expounding on my shopping habits and bemoaning a lack of advertising directed towards my personal interests. Usually, I'm complaining about the weather, talking about baseball, loved ones, so on and so forth. So how does gmail extract keywords from those conversations? Well, that's the problem. And it's a problem that my friend Jess has had recently, leading him to post about this hilarious personalized advertisement he received. Jess, I just hope to god that you weren't writing about that in your emails . . .