"The holidays are a time for reflection, but lately I've been overthinking things: Over the past few weeks, I've listened to a playlist of my top songs via Spotify Wrapped, revisited my summer-long job hunt on LinkedIn's Year in Review, and ruminated on my crossword abilities with The New York Times' Year in Games feature. In 2025, there seem to be more of these data interpolators than ever:"
"The event-planning service Partiful invites users to an After Party, revealing the people they socialized with the most this year. Your Year With ChatGPT lets us see how many em dashes we exchanged with AI. There's also PlayStation's Wrap-Up, Goodreads' Year in Books, and Years in Review for Duolingo, Letterboxd, and Oura. Even Untappd, a social network for beer enthusiasts, has a year-end wrap-up called Recappd."
"The wrap-up tradition has been around for a number of years, but what was once a cheeky bit of marketing has now expanded into a full-blown season of its own. In today's internet landscape, personalization is the coin of the realm: Search results, on-site advertisements, and social feeds are all tailored to users' precise desires based on their behaviors. During recap season, those behaviors themselves become the product."
Year-end wrap-ups have spread across many apps, transforming personal activity into shareable summaries and marketing tools. Platforms such as Spotify, LinkedIn, PlayStation, Goodreads, Duolingo, Letterboxd, Oura, Partiful, ChatGPT, and Untappd create personalized visualizations of users' behaviors. Personalization now drives search results, ads, and social feeds, and recap features package behavioral data as a consumer-facing product. Data previously used only for internal analytics becomes entertaining content, but those recaps also reveal the scale of tracking and the commercial value of personal information. The crowded market pressures more products to adopt unnecessary wrap-up formats.
Read at The Atlantic
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