4me2 — user-owned reviews

AI companies pay for human-written content now; the people who wrote it collect nothing. 4me2 routes that money to authors. It lifts the reviews you already wrote out of a Google Takeout export and turns them into assets on your own domain that AI agents pay to use, per request, fractions of a cent at a time. Setup happens once; after that the reviews just sit there, able to earn.

The status quo is stranger than it sounds. There is no API for your own contributions: the only programmatic path to review data is Google's Places API, metered per request, capped at five reviews per place, and licensed so you cannot keep copies of what you wrote. One company holds the world's places knowledge (Yelp's 2024 antitrust suit against Google describes what happened to everyone else who tried), and anything AI systems need that much should have more than one door.

Website: x4me2.com · Why this exists: antimoloch.org/research

Status

Piece	State
Schema + validators (@4me2/schema)	Working
Crypto: Ed25519, JWT-VC, did:web (@4me2/crypto)	Working
Google Takeout parser (@4me2/takeout-parser)	Working
CLI: keygen, import, verify (@4me2/cli)	Working
Author node with x402 payment endpoints (@4me2/author-node)	Stub, in design
Discovery index (@4me2/index)	Stub, in design

The signing pipeline is real today. The payment layer is the next milestone: each author node will serve reviews as x402 endpoints (HTTP 402, then USDC micropayment on Base, then content), with per-review pricing set by the author.

Quickstart

Requires Node ≥ 20 and pnpm ≥ 9.

git clone https://github.com/tymrtn/4me2.git
cd 4me2
pnpm install
pnpm -r build

Run the pipeline against the included sample export:

node packages/cli/dist/index.js keygen -o author.key.json
node packages/cli/dist/index.js import fixtures/sample-takeout.json -k author.key.json -d did:web:example.reviews -o reviews
node packages/cli/dist/index.js verify reviews -k author.key.json

You should see Verified 3 files: 3 valid, 0 invalid. The fixture holds four entries: two reviews with text, one rating-only, and one that the parser deliberately skips because Takeout marked it incomplete. Each signed review is a small portable file carrying its own proof of authorship (in standards terms, a JWT verifiable credential), named by its content hash. manifest.json lists everything under your identity.

Using your own reviews

1. Request your data at takeout.google.com — select Maps (your places). This is your right under GDPR and data-portability law.
2. Find Takeout/Maps (your places)/Reviews.json in the download.
3. Run import on that file with your own key and DID (for a domain you control, use did:web:yourdomain.com).

Signed reviews are plain files. Host them anywhere; they verify against your public key wherever they travel.

How it works

• Export. Google Takeout gives you your reviews as GeoJSON. The parser normalizes them to schema.org/Review objects with stable sha256 content hashes.
• Prove. The tool stamps each review so anyone can check you wrote it and nobody can forge it. You never touch a key ceremony; keygen runs once and everything after is automatic. (In standards terms: a JWT verifiable credential, Ed25519-signed, under your did:web identifier.)
• Host. Your domain, your server. Each author node is meant to be an independent endpoint no platform can revoke.
• Get paid (in design). Agents request a review, receive HTTP 402 with payment requirements, pay in USDC via x402, and get the content. Pricing is per-review and author-set.

Repository layout

packages/
  schema/          Zod schemas: Takeout input, canonical Review, manifest
  crypto/          Ed25519 keys, content hashing, JWT-VC sign/verify
  takeout-parser/  Google Takeout Reviews.json → canonical Review objects
  cli/             4me2 keygen | import | verify
  author-node/     x402-serving node (stub)
  index/           discovery index (stub)
fixtures/
  sample-takeout.json  synthetic Takeout export used by tests and the quickstart

pnpm -r test runs everything against the synthetic fixture; no personal data is required or included.

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome, especially on the author-node design: payment flow, caching semantics, and what a discovery index owes to authors versus consumers. Apache 2.0, same license as x402, patent grant included.