How would you like to answer that question without ever hearing it? I’ve been reading a little bit online about Mycybertwin.com a site that proposes to handle mundane conversations as if the bot you create was you. Useful for dating sites, meet and greets, business contacts etc. They propose the ability to have dynamic FAQS, available through this service. Have your companies personnel questions handled by a CyberTwin. A neat concept to say the least, especially for the dating crowd, which I wanted to throw out there I’m not in.
Now site avatars are nothing new, in fact there are even ones that have digital face facsimiles to go with the verbiage you type. A virtual conversation with something that looks straight out of A Scanner Darkly. But that is not this site. The virtual avatar craze has even reached out tonon sentient machines, look at what my Xbox 360 has to say about me. Freaky. And if Barbie Horse adventures shows up on the play list its not me, really.
Rather than having a profile you fill out it allows you to teach the bot to answer as you would, a process that I have still not completed. So Far i have taken no longer than 35 minutes to throw this bot together and still have not gotten all of the pertinant information down. The site runs off of a concept called credits, of which you get 500 a month. One chat conversation 1 credit, answer an email 25 creds. I think there is some system in place to garner more credits but as I said I still haven’t completed my profile.
How does this work with issues such as marriage, children, favorite bands etc? Well its all up to you. When the questions head towards marriage flash the ring if you are and your worried about the possible appearance of impropriety. A question such as are you flirting with me should elicit an appropriate response depending on whether or not you would wish to flirt with someone. Although run screaming from the room doesn’t translate well to text. I can see plenty of possibilities for this platform as a whole. Combine this with a flikr api, a google map api and its like your there. You can see and do what I do.
You can add content in from RSS feeds, respond to frequently asked questions, ask questions, this site runs the gamut of preparing for any conversation. Imagine creating a digital doppelganger so complex it becomes indistinguishable from the real you? Could this be the matrix replacing me? The only real complaint I have about the site lies in their personality types. All are positive traits, not a mean spirited section in the bunch. This of course opens up the door for the MyEvilCyberTwin, for abuse and help desk duties.
This service is unbelievably detailed and I can’t wait to finish the whole profile to throw it up on the site, until that time feel free to abuse my virtual self. Also a word of warning from the security conscious. Any information you put out into the ether of the ether/internet can be used against you so if your dumb enough to tell the who what when where and why of all things illegal be prepared to pay the price. A thing the MySpace crowd is still trying to learn. So identity theft and pretexting may be all the rage right now but leave your virtual self ignorant of your real self’s details. Keep it casual, keep it vague, keep it safe.
We have heard, and are building an evil mycybertwin base personality.
It should be ready in the next week or three! We were so bored with the cutesy nice personalities we decided to put up first, so we were drawing straws over who gets the fun of tossing evil together.