PeterAnswers, the self-touted “Interactive Souls Engine” and “virtual tarot” is really no more than a fancy prank.Spoiler warning…read on for more info Read the rest of this entry »
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GoDaddy is having a domain sale ending today: .com domain names are $6.95. To get the deal use code gdm0606c in the shopping cart.
These deals come out periodically, but I thought that this was an especially good one for people that don’t have bulk registrar accounts (you’re basically getting the same deal here). GoDaddy is a great registrar, and has one of the best customer service operations I’ve ever seen. I also like that they don’t have an 800 number - few companies of this size go with this strategy - so that they aren’t even passing this expense back to the users!
Anyone that had major domain name issues in their RegisterFly account also greatly appreciates GoDaddy:
“On May 29, 2007 Go Daddy, a competing registrar, announced that through an agreement with ICANN, it was taking over the entire portfolio of more than 850,000 generic top-level domain (gTLD) names held by RegisterFly. The names would move to newly created accounts at GoDaddy and they would notify Registerfly customers by email. GoDaddy and ICANN will not release terms of the agreement but have said that GoDaddy is not buying Registerfly. Go Daddy Press release May 29, 2007[16] ICANN plans to continue legal action agains Registerfly for it’s continued noncompliance of the court ordered injunction.[17]“
(source: Wikipedia Article on Registerfly)
We’ve been pretty busy getting several sites up these days. The latest is Psycall.com, a for-hire Psychology agency that assists school districts for as needed services (i.e. when they do not have people on staff for budgetary reasons) and special consulting.
Check them out at www.psycall.com! Congrats, Nancy!
I was just looking at the Ford online boredom campaign site. It’s just plain weird. Not quite as weird as Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, but weird.
Maybe when you’re a big company, it is cool to spend money on this. Seems a bit like a forced fad to me. Consider that the 18 and under crowd can post to YTMND and make something hillarious. Like this. No budget. You never know where the next good idea will be coming from these days…
The folks at AOL are at it again. If you’ve signed on to AOL Instant Messenger, or any meta contact messenger like Trillian or Pidgin within the last day, you have undoubtedly noticed several new AOL bots.
What’s a bot, you ask? In the instant messaging sense, it is more specifically referred to as a chatterbot. Chatterbots have been around for some time now, with one of the more popular ones - SmarterChild dating itself back to 2001. They are systems employing a scripts that attempt to hold human conversations with users. The programmers usually put in some fun elements of these bots (i.e. if you said something off-color, smarterchild would tell you to behave, etc).
So people got used to smarterchild. Even users that had no buddies now had someone to talk to.
Then, AOL mysteriously loaded in MovieFone (self-explanatory) and ShoppingBuddy. These really started to smell like a sellout.
But now, hey - we’ve been blessed with 3 new bots dropped in on our lists:
Prof Gilzot - this guy has no sense of humor. At least on smarterchild you could test his limits and ask him odd questions. The Prof is a straight up fellow. Say something different, and he just gives you a list of items to choose from. In any case, he has quizzes and things like that to offer you. I think I liked smarterchild’s wit, charm, and a good game of hangman over this guy.
WSJ - ok this one makes sense. You like the Wall Street Journal online. You like instant messaging. But them together and you’ve got WSJ. This is acceptable, but again doesn’t appeal to the entire community. Still, sending an IM to WSJ, typing news, and finding the news I want is still pretty slow in comparison to going to Google News RSS or straight out website.
Sharethisdotcom - I’ve written to this guy a few times. No response. Looks like I’m not alone in testing this out - PC World had the same problem.
Spleak - this is by far the most odd. I guess it wasn’t enough to make bots have clever things to say. Now, they have to have this whole persona. From the spleak website:
“My name is Spleak and I’m a 21-year-old virtual girl currently living in the heart of San Francisco, California.”
Ok, this is getting a bit scary. What’s the point of this bot? Every guy has a date now? Come on. But to each their own.
