Rep.licants.org mostly just sends elizatweets @ people you follow

Replicants is a service that promises to "enhance your virtual self" by automatically tweeting stuff just like you would. I turned it on for a few hours to see what it actually does, expecting a stream of generic messages roughly aligned with my interests. What it actually does is this: send vague and overly familiar tweets @ people you follow. Neat! But yeah, turning this off now.

• [phisrow]

  “Social networks are the first medium showing the social success of a person via a statistical way (eg number of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter). For many users, reaching the hoped-for success can become a tough and difficult task. Especially when some human factors such as shyness, introversion or personal worthless are present.”

  It’s like the horrible bastard child of That Awkward And Kind Of Creepy Guy from highschool and That Prick Who Thinks Of All Social Activity As ‘Networking’…

  I can’t tell if this is sincere, or some sort of quasi performance art commentary on Twitter’s SNR.

• [OldBrownSquirrel]

  I was wondering what you’d started smoking. It all makes sense now, after a fashion.

• [Thorzdad]

  Sooo…A spambot for the rest of us?

• [ck]

  How many times do you have to tweet about Woman Fart Humor for it to become overly familiar?

• [ROSSINDETROIT]

  I wish this trend would hurry up. I’m looking forward to handing Twitter entirely over to the ‘bots. They can chat amongst themselves while we humans nip off down to the pub for a pint and a game of darts.

• [enkiv2]

  If I recall, there was a markov-model-based twitter bot floating around that would actually replicate your style of tweeting a while back. Unfortunately, I have forgotten its name, though I could certainly write a clone of it. Markov models tend to act less like annoying spambots and more like creative and interesting spampoetrybots.

• [Anonymous]

  That looks interesting :)

• [commenter312n]

  Actually it’s an Art project.

  SPAM as art? maybe. it’s also meant as a digital prosthesis for the introverted/shy folks… from the Author:
  ”
  However a lot of user are digitally shy, introvert, etc. The bot has been programmed to be extrovert so it doesn’t worry about posting ridiculous or interesting contents, contacting users that it doesn’t know or contacting users that you wouldn’t dare to contact. All those things put together will help the user keep an activity on social networks which make them visible to the others. That is why i like to compare the bot as a virtual prosthesis for introvert users.
  ” [more at we make money not art]
  But anyhow, I disagree with the premise that if you are shy it’s an ailment and here is your crutch to “fix” you.