gregmarra

Name things

It makes them real

“Famous”

Last weekend, while visiting San Diego, I passed a place called Jimmy’s Famous American Tavern. From this, I can only infer the following:

1. Jimmy started a restaurant called Jimmy’s American Tavern
2. Many people came to it, and started talking about it
3. When people came to the Jimmy’s they were unsure if it was the Jimmy’s they had heard about
4. In order to stem confusion, Jimmy renamed his establishment in order to reflect its newfound fame
5. Everything was much clearer

Otherwise, how else would Jimmy know it was going to become famous?

Gepetto’s Army

Yesterday, I talked about Social Robots at SXSW. It was great sharing this new topic with the audience, and I was flattered by the feedback on the #twitterbots hashtag.

Unfortunately, the talk wasn’t recorded, but I’ve put the slides online. You don’t get the narration, but you can check them out! Hopefully you’ll find them thought provoking.

Social Robots, SXSW, and the future

Almost two and a half years ago, before Ashton and CNN, I embarked on a challenge to see if Social Robots could infiltrate online communities. Zack Coburn and I launched a small armada of fully autonomous Twitter bots against clusters of users who already knew each other. A project in Mark Chang’s course at Olin College, we called it Project Realboy after Gepetto’s puppet Pinocchio. Each bot, acting completely without human intervention, tried to sneak in to a group by camouflaging itself with forged tweets.

The project was overwhelming successful at creating emotional connections between the target users and bots. One bot, @trackgirl, was deployed against a group of running enthusiasts. Every day, completely on “her” own, trackgirl tweeted about her marathon training. The runners she followed followed her back, and she wove her way into the community. One day trackgirl tweeted that she had fallen and hurt her knee. Her followers immediately replied with concern, asking if she was ok.

Luckily, trackgirl was a Python script running on a server we got from eBay, impervious to scraped knees. However, the lessons that Realboys like trackgirl and our dozens of other bots teach us have a worrying theme: social media can be manipulated at scale by a few puppetmasters.

Twitter has proven to be an invaluable tool for communication during breaking news intense periods of political unrest. When thousands of people tweet, the outside world gets a chance to understand events on the ground. But what if none of those thousands of people were real, and the events never happened? A malicious puppetmaster could create hundreds of Twitter bots, letting them live perfectly normal and believable lives for months while they build up followers. Then one day, a careful crafted false story unfolds on the stage of social media, played out by a single director with hundreds of actors. Incidents like the attack on Congresswoman Giffords demonstrate that powerful stories can become widespread before there is time for fact checking. Before anyone realizes all the TwitPics are faked, the false news will have made international headlines.

Social Robots challenge our preconceived notions of what social media can be used for. They present a dangerous threat to the news industry, but also a powerful opportunity to help people. If you’re going to be at SXSW, come learn more about how Social Robots work, what they’re capable of, and where they might go next.

Gepetto’s Army: Creating International Incidents with Twitter
Monday, March 14 at 9:30AM
Sheraton, Creekside Room
701 East 11th St

Captive Audience

I send a disproportionate amount of personal emails from planes. There is nothing else to distract me, so I jot dozens of notes to friends.

Glass

We are a few years from having a generation of teens who are faster keyboardists on multitouch glass than physical keyboards.

Social Music

Results:
• Rodrigo y Gabriela
• Two Door Cinema Club
• “fun.”
• Seal
• Ryan Montbleau
• Bootie Top 10
• Uffie
• Colin Hay
• The Script

Wanted: Penpals

All of my personal correspondance since summer 2004

Since the summer is here, I am reinitiating the Greg Marra Summer Penpal Program. If you would like to apply to be a participant of GMSPP 2010, please mail a handwritten letter that enumerates your qualifications and explains why you should be admitted to the program.

There is no limit to the number of participants that can be accepted into GMSPP 2010, but priority will be given to applications received earlier. All applicants will receive a handwritten response from GMSPP informing them of Application Committee’s decision.

My address is on my Facebook profile, and will work until mid-July. Please note that GMSPP is unable to return any documents or video tapes sent in your applications.

• Location: Hartford area
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests