I don’t use IM too much anymore, but occasionally I log in to speak with a couple of fellow travelers and random friends from the past.
I’ve mentioned in passing that one of my friends is the guy behind the fairly popular HowToGeek site. And unsurprisingly, he is a pretty cool geek that is always working on some esoteric project.
The most recent one is calling “trouting.”
He didn’t invent it but he has become [temporarily] interested in how the system works.
For those not in the know (which included me 5 minutes ago), trouting works like this.
A chat bot operated by some random administrator sends you a message. If you respond to it, the bot automatically dives into a database of other screen names (usually scraped off of LiveJournal). It then sends a message to that user as well.
Then it anonymously syncs the two conversations to one another, acting as a 3rd party proxy. And the most interesting part is that no one is the wiser unless they are explicitly familiar with this type of parlor trick.
You think you’re talking to a bot, but in reality, you’re talking to the other person.
While the original authors could have had some kind of malicious intent with the system, it feels more like the work of a psychology dissertation that has mutated on its own.
Each variation has been named after a type of fish (first salmon, then trout) — maybe the next wave will be tuna or piranha…
Think that it could be commercialized for an online dating service, suicide prevention or drug abuser hot line?