Gary Robinson

Gary has a deep interest in exploring whether there is any way to use the internet to help fix the extreme polarization that exists in America today. Politically, he’s probably center-left, but voted once for George W. Bush and felt that Bill Clinton should have been successfully impeached.

He is a long-time innovator in online communications.

Most notably, in a patent, Gary is the author of the first known description of how to use browser cookies to keep track of user activities on the internet for the purpose of showing ads the met the user’s interests wherever the user might be. There is no known earlier teaching on how to do that. Besides the browser technique, this patent contained many privacy-oriented innovations long before such issues were of general concern. That patent is now owned by Google, and they have used it in court to defend themselves in at least one patent-based lawsuit. (He is happy to say that it has never been used to sue any company or person, that he knows of.)

He was also the main developer of an algorithm for catching email spam. That algorithm was incorporated into such award-winning products as SpamSieve (2004 MacUser Software of the Year, among many other awards) and SpamAssassin (Datamation’s 2005 and 2006 Software Product Of The Year, among many other awards).

Going even farther back, before the internet existed, he created the first voice-based dating service available in New York City, which operated using the telephone, 212-ROMANCE.

212-ROMANCE included a technology for recommending recorded personals ads to each other based on how people generally responded to each ad. If you liked the same ads as a particular user, and a new ad was created that that user liked, it would be recommended to you too. This approach of using user behavior to recommend content to other users, which eventually became known as “collaborative filtering”, is behind the algorithms in use at Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. As far as Gary knews, 212-ROMANCE was the first commercial service to incorporate it in real-world use.

Now, those same algorithms are increasing our tendency toward tribalism; Reality Party is Gary’s attempt to do the opposite. In a sense, with this project he’s coming full-circle.

He’s also a regular meditator, and an amateur singer/songwriter.