Y Combinator is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnTy_smY3sw&NR

Impressive stuff. All these humanoids and robots used to be forte of japanese and its good that there are more advanced stuffs in here. One japanese guy had joked to me once saying that all those outdated stuff in japan comes to US. Now i think he wil soon take back his words

good lord that is amazing!

That's a rotten business that has to use bots to make the site look busy. After a while you will start believing that those bots are actually users and think your site is being used by 1000s of people - until reality hits you some sunny day. Instead invest that time in getting users. It's not easy - but neither is it THAT hard!

At least when you catch some sort of fire and start getting a decent stream of traffic, it will be something you can be proud of and build on.

About dating sites using bots - states are now enacting laws to regulate that. Watch out.

I dunno about bots, but almost every social website I know is bootstrapped by having the founders comment back and forth with each other. There was an interview with Reddit where they said their first 2 months basically consisted of the two of them submitting every link they could find to their own site.

When I was at inAsphere.com, the first thing we did after launch was "Okay, I want every staff member to create at least 5 fake personas, and have conversations with yourselves." So we created accounts and came up with backgrounds and personalities and stuff, and had mock arguments with ourselves on the forums.

I know cross-x.com started the same way, since it was by the same founder.

The only website I've been involved with which didn't seed things with a bunch of fake usernames was FictionAlley. That was largely because the site was intended to be personal, for a few friends only, and only randomly happened to catch on among the general fandom. Since it was started with more than a dozen founders, they had ample material to begin with.

True. I can relate to that. I personally have launched quite a few sites but if I can't get initial traction, I usually go back to the drawing board and figure out why or fold them - so clearly I have a bias against this business of fake personas and bots.

I was involved with a dot com back in 2001 where I did an internship. Our first week consisted of all the staff members(there were about 10 of them) creating accounts and contributing. BUT THAT WASN'T THE SITE'S MAIN MARKETING PLAN. That is what you have to understand. Bots and fake personas have very limited lifetime; at the end you have to get real users to make your site of some worth.

Of course; a site that's just the staff commenting back and forth to each other is really a circlejerk, not a webapp. That's what killed inAsphere: it really wasn't all that interesting. Even after getting all sorts of publicity, we weren't retaining visitors. And our existing userbase (we folded cross-x.com into it) was leaving not bringing their friends in.

But there's a difference between a site that sucks no matter what you do and a site that could survive on its own if only it passed the initial attracting-users hurdle. Reddit's a good example of the latter: I checked it out about a week after it launched, and it was really quite boring. I came back a few months later, and it actually had a thriving community. If the Reddit founders hadn't stuck with it and just folded the site, they'd be out a few million dollars.

Smarter part of social networking is get your employees for free ;D If you employ people and engage them in content management or info retrieval..it would end up being a costly affair. Instead allowing users to push in content is a smarter way to get traffic plus getting things for free. Now using a bot inside such a site would repeal traffic as they would view anything and everything as a bot. No one wants to talk to bots, they want to interact with a smarter being like them.

Bots and fake profiles suck and your visitors will smell them a mile away.

Throw a party for your friends, have them all bring laptops and make up a drinking game around posting things to Study Stickies. Or you could just ask them to do it. You should throw up an "About/How to/FAQ/Tour" to explain what your site is.

BTW, do you object to the use of bots in http://espgame.org?

Did you even know that it uses bots sometimes?

Yes, they use bots to beat cheaters http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ESP.pdf

That's different than using bots to interact with legitimate users.

Watch Luis von Ahn's presentation of the ESP game at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=carnegie+mellon+image+game. It's very entertaining and you'll even learn why spammers host free porn sites even though they aren't in the porn business.

From the paper:

"Having pre-recorded game play is especially useful when the game is still gaining popularity. When there are few players, only a single person will usually be playing the game at a time."

So the ESP Game does use bots to make the site look busy.

It depends on what your definition of "bot" is. Are you talking about when the ESP game records a person's session, then plays those moves back to other players (and other recorded sessions)? If enough about the recorded play is logged, why should the person playing interactively care?

I always thought that's one reason his games are so clever. You get better data out this way, too. Seems perfectly legit to me.

Does it matter if the bot was constructed from prerecorded play or not? What if it was constructed from prerecorded play from multiple players? What if it combined prerecorded play with heuristics?

It's still misleading. The player is expecting to play with another human being live.

This begs the question, how do you define a bot? From my understanding of the talk, they replay one person's session and don't use composites. But, point taken.

For the ESP Game, it might be the case that they replay one person's session.

But for Phetch:

"Emulating Seekers in a convincing manner is more difficult. If a real player enters useless descriptions of the image, we do not want the emulated Seekers to find it. Although this is not a significant problem since most Describers enter accurate descriptions of images, we nevertheless address it to protect the illusion that a real game is being played. The solution to the problem relies on the fact that we are using images from the ESP Game database, so the keywords associated with the images in the search engine are already known. Therefore, we emulate Seekers by not guessing the right image until a certain number of the ESP keywords have been entered by the Describer."

http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2005/CMU-CS-05-193.pdf#page=56

Yes, we have. But instead of within the site itself, we circulated the screenames of IM chatbots which then directed traffic to the site. Not one of those garbage "eliza" bots either, this was of custom design and worked nicely.

Let me know if you're interested in more technical details.

I've seen dating sites for sale that come loaded with fake profiles. Generally, it seems like a really bad idea.

How did you know the profiles were fake?

The idea is to make the bots convincing.

I mean, I've seen a commodity dating site script available that came with an option for generating fake profiles.

for that u need a good AI bot.