Yes. I know a few people who have done it with so-call "social media experts" using a Markov bot that's trained on a handful of known SMDs. Scary part, most of them garnered over a thousand followers. :-/
Very early on in the days when ICQ still had an unencrypted client that allowed you to connect to a random ICQ user that was online I played around with a very simple human backed bot that would open a bunch of connections and if it ran out of stuff to say would IM the operator with a bit of context. The reply was then saved so that the next time around when it would get in to that situation it would have a reply waiting.
It was lots of fun doing that, and I can imagine doing this on facebook would be just as much fun.
For the hack day project we attempted to take a target user of a social network, and then to look at the friends to derive properties that we would then include (diluted) in our fake user.
The aim of the hack day experiment was to see whether the fake profile would both be convincing enough and attractive enough to then be befriended by the network of people that the target was a member of.
The experiment failed in the time given as hackday didn't last long enough and our target didn't log on. But I ran the code again later and it worked well (being befriended a few times before I figured that it was beyond the experiment and should be killed).
Seems like spammers have done this (convincingly enough for at least some users). I don't have some foolproof method from telling a spambot from a spammer using copy/paste everywhere, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised.
I saw this presentation, and despite the minor mistakes made, it was an incredibly successful project. Good to note that none of this was automated, and latency was one of the mistakes.
Yes, made 30+ fake people for an advertising company I used to work at. They're long since dormant, but it provided some perspective on how people make friends online, what it takes to maintain 'friendships', and many other factors. Couldn't use facebook for months afterward, everything just seemed so plastic.
I made a couple on twitter... based on a hacked up AIML engine. This one is the best of the bunch though. http://twitter.com/coolestalison
@coolestalison
It was especially entertaining to see people trying to carry conversations with her, some even flirting. It wasn't perfect, but managed to fool quite a bit of people. I hadn't been running her for a while, maybe I should bring her back to life again.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] threadIt was, indeed, an interesting experiment.
It was lots of fun doing that, and I can imagine doing this on facebook would be just as much fun.
We worked on a project that took as inspiration a photo montage research thing that stated that the average of a stack of photos is the most attractive: http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychol...
For the hack day project we attempted to take a target user of a social network, and then to look at the friends to derive properties that we would then include (diluted) in our fake user.
The aim of the hack day experiment was to see whether the fake profile would both be convincing enough and attractive enough to then be befriended by the network of people that the target was a member of.
The experiment failed in the time given as hackday didn't last long enough and our target didn't log on. But I ran the code again later and it worked well (being befriended a few times before I figured that it was beyond the experiment and should be killed).
These guys started hitting on you didn't they?
@coolestalison
It was especially entertaining to see people trying to carry conversations with her, some even flirting. It wasn't perfect, but managed to fool quite a bit of people. I hadn't been running her for a while, maybe I should bring her back to life again.