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Instant Messenger or Instant Advertiser?

Posted by timothy on from the insidious-synthetic-friends dept.

Shadow2097 writes: "ABC News is running this moderately disturbing story about a new, highly targeted form of advertising. Two companies, SmarterChild.com and ActiveBuddy.com have teamed up to deliver interactive Instant Messenger bots that talk to children and deliver ever-so-subtle ads for various products. Just when you think market saturation has reached the limit, leave it to a greedy corporation to start targeting the most naive and vulnerable demographic there is."

3 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How is this anything new? by Suppafly · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not sure about Active Buddy.. but SmarterChild is obviously not like talking to an eliza type program that convinces you to buy things. SmarterChild is more like an interactive program that can play text based games with you and give you information such as weather and stocks. You'd be hard pressed to trick anyone that can read that they are talking to anything other than a computer script.

  2. Re:How is it... by midendian · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, it does have a decent calculator, but multiplying large numbers hardly proves it.

    Here:

    (18:42:30) SmarterChild: More calculator requests:

    What is 7.1 * ((3.17 + 9.41 + 27.81) * 4) / 16.4) ?
    shortcut: 7.1*(((3.17+9.41+27.81)*4)/16.4)
    What is sqrt(3**2 + 4**2) * log(sin(pi / 2)) ?
    shortcut: sqrt(3**2+4**2)*log(sin(pi/2))

    Or how about:

    (18:42:43) [x]: set output radix to 16
    (18:42:44) SmarterChild: output radix set to 16
    (18:42:59) [x]: #0f4 | 8#700
    (18:43:01) SmarterChild: 500 8#764

    These are of course slightly undocumented. The radix is similar to the emacs calculator.

    --
    --eek!--
  3. Re:How is this anything new? by rawb · · Score: 5, Informative

    You guys are all freaking out... Smarterchild doesnt go IMing these children on its own. You have to IM it yourself, usually with a specific purpose in mind. The same is true of every active buddy bot. They arent trying to trick anyone at all; They provide a service and are hoping to get corporations interested in it. Their product does have real potential. Imagine each brand of detergent having their own IM SN, where you could ask them the best way to get a stain out, or could compare ingredients between each competing product. You won't hear any public outcry from me until these active buddy bots start amassing huge AIM lists and spamming people.