Sock it to me, puppet
I confess that I hadn't heard the terms "sock puppet" and "meat puppet" used to refer to fake Internet identities before I had read about a recent snafu on Facebook, the popular college alumni online watering hole. A local company named "Ruckus Networks" created a fake Facebook account for "Brody Ruckus." Brody, according to his Facebook entry, was trying to get 300,000 fans to sign up to be his friend, because if he did, his girlfriend would have a menage a trois with him and another young lady. True to form, Mr. Ruckus got half a million signups in short order. Unfortunately he wasn't real. He was a "sock puppet", a virtual personna created solely for marketing purposes. Ruckus successfully harvested 500,000 names from this stunt and generated some valuable, fake grassroots buzz (called "Astroturf").
I am not sure that I have a problem with this. It's kind of clever, certainly funny. I guess it depends on what Ruckus does with the names.
Get used to this. I've been anticipating this kind of thing for many years. The line between fake identities and real identities is blurring. This is a brain-dead case because it's a static profile. Imagine a fully interactive personna in a chat session and being unable to tell if it's real or not. Not possible, you say? Check out Eliza. For those who remember, Eliza was one of the earliest AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs that would appear to carry on meaningful conversation by using psycho babble, picking up key words from the user's sentences and throwing them back as questions. Eliza was the mother of early computer games like Adventure and it's commercial follow-on Zork.
Kudos to Ruckus. Today it's amusing. Soon it will be obnoxious. I predict a new kind of "Elizaspam" in which social networking sites are brought to their knees by fake personnas created by advertisers.
Posted on October 09, 2006
