It was my Evil Cyber Twin… Honest!!

I just came across an article about a new product release – its called MyCyberTwin. Basically it allows account holders to carry out conversations on Instant Messenger (e.g. MSN and Yahoo! Chat) 24 hours a day. How?

By creating a clone of yourself, of course! (Now wasn’t that completely obvious?!)

It works by creating an online “clone” of users based on a 79 question personality quiz and hundreds of additional training questions. Once it’s complete, a chat bot is created for that user, which can be embedded into MySpace or another website, or can log into Microsoft Messenger on your behalf and pretend to be you.

Founders Liesl Capper and John Zakos think the service will appeal to social networks and dating sites that are looking for user features that create more content and a stickier site.

Although, I do believe that IT companies should get into the ‘connectivity’ culture and that the way to do this is through social networks, I’m not sure if this particular project is a good one. It doesn’t take a genius to realise the implications of having a chat bot pretending to be you. At the very least you may piss off your friend or perhaps rifts in relationships. But I think, depending on how the system actually works and how smart or stupid the chat bot is, it may actually open users up to the possibility of being sued for defamation!