The Medium Is The Instant Message
from the IM-advertising dept
People have been afraid of instant messaging advertising for a while now, because the idea of instant (and intrusive) spam is not particularly appealing. However, ActiveBuddy has kept up its plans to create advertising "buddies" you can chat with and people seem to like them. I wonder how much of the initial acceptance of the ActiveBuddy buddies are due to the novelty factor? I'm very (very) addicted to instant messaging and the idea of chatting with a program, when I'm sure I could just as easily look up the same info on the web just isn't that appealing to me - other than maybe initially to see how it works. I could also see it being fun as a sort of reverse Turing test, as people try to trip it up.
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