IM Buddies That Are There To Sell
from the it's-all-marketing dept
Anyone who knows anything about AliceBot, knows that people love to chat - even if they're talking to a machine. The LA Times (republished at Nando) has a long story about the popularity of instant messaging bots that are there for marketing. They're basically IM versions of AliceBot that have been built (mostly by ActiveBuddy) to interact with people and trying to market products to them. Interestingly, the folks at ActiveBuddy claim that when they first started building the bots they set them up just to give information, and not to have a personality. However, they quickly realized that people want to chat - even if it's just a computer they're talking to. Apparently, some people want to talk so badly, that they'll talk to an electronic salesperson that's just there to sell them something.
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