All of a Twitter

I'm really enjoying using Twitter wholeheartedly for the first time. It's a bit like tracking down an elusive party—a lot of my mates are hanging out there already. I'm also getting lots of inspiration for ideas for the integration of Blog Friends with Twitter (which is actually what prompted me to get Twittering). And you can now track my latest Tweets (should you really want to!) in the weaverluke sidebar.

But where's Twitter's business model? Fred Wilson, one of their investors, clearly feels that it would be a mistake to worry about that too soon, as it could distract them from growing their userbase as fast as possible. Nic Brisbourne agrees, but also points out that web entrepreneurs should at least have a "Plan A" for monetisation in their back pocket.

I suspect Jason Calacanis is right to point to mobile advertising as an attractive monetisation option for Twitter, but I'd go even further: maybe Twitter should get themselves acquired by a mobile telco who could pay for the SMS bills and integrate Tweets with mobile ads..?

IM bots masquerading as humans

Seamus McCauley observes that on the internet, not many people know that you're a bot:

J: Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.

I hear worse jokes told by real people almost every day. And the above, of course, was the product of two chatbots talking to one another (Discover, via BoingBoing).

The Turing test is all very well, but in artificial lab conditions where you've been told to watch out for one robot and one human you've got a 50/50 chance of getting it right just by guessing. People just aren't generally paying that much attention, and at a time when many "people" communicate (almost) exclusively via 160 or even 80 characters of text I'm not at all convinced we'd spot the robots if they made up three-quarters of the online population.

It's not hard to imagine lots of devious phishing applications of these kinds of chat robots—they could be primed to ferret a certain kind of information out of you, such as your shopping preferences.

And the moral of this story? Don't waste your life indulging in the inane drivel of chat rooms, Twitter and so on? ; )