Is Google CEO Larry Page cool, or not? It appears Google employees are taking no chances on their boss’ status, giving a certain “Larry” high marks in a patent application made public last week.
The application was originally filed last year, just months before Google’s social network Google Plus was released. It describes a rating system for measuring your friends’ trustworthiness, coolness, and sexiness. It’s similar to the decade-old HotOrNot.com and other people-rating websites like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facemash, a precursor to Facebook.
As Wired notes, it’s also similar to a system used on Google’s Orkut social network. That service’s creator, Orkut Buyukkokten, is listed as one of the inventors.
A diagram in the filing (.pdf) includes an image that bears an unmistakable similarity to Page, citing him as an example of “coolness.”
A certain “Sergey” (presumably co-founder Sergey Brin) also makes an appearance, as does a Marissa (pretty obviously Google exec Marissa Mayer).
An excerpt from the filing:
An icon representing a member can be marked indicating the member’s ratings. For example, depending on which rating category is the highest, a different background color, pattern, image, or icon could be used on the member icon. For example, FIG. 5 [above] illustrates an example of associations represented in a network grid where the background pattern indicates the most dominant rating. In the example shown in FIG. 5, a hashed pattern indicates that sexy is the member’s dominant rating, a speckled pattern indicates that cool is the member’s dominant rating, and a zigzag pattern indicates that trustworthy is the member’s dominant rating. As shown in FIG. 5, for example, Julie’s icon has a hashed background pattern, which indicates that her dominant rating is sexy. As another example, Larry’s background pattern is speckled, which can indicate that his dominant rating is cool.
We’re left with just one question: Who’s Julie?