Other people's friends

[jofish22]

So in a fit of wasting time, having had the neighbours over to dinner tonight, I went to look at friends' friends lists. And, frankly, Oh My God. Now, I like my friends a lot. In person, they're interesting and fun and creative and stimulating and all that stuff. I even like some -- many, no doubt -- of my friends' friends. But reading my friends' friends livejournals is excrutiating. People whining about every detail of their lives. Complaining about service at restaurants, about how they met this guy but maybe they didn't, how they are totally unique and nobody understands them, how they're totally unique and everyone understands them, how they're totally unique and everyone understands them except, and this is the big except, their mother. Plus, they saw this movie, ok, and it was kinda good but kinda not and there was this guy in who was really good but not as good as he was in this other movie. ...waiit just a second. They aren't all scripts, are they? I swear, several friends of friends journals are clearly not actually written by human beings. They're all ljBots. (Dammit. Googling ljbot brings up Eugene's post as the first coherent hit on ljbot. And he means a crawler. I mean like a chatterbot. An angstbot, that's what I mean.) Ok, that makes me feel much better. I'm pretty sure I can write a program that'll take a bunch of LJ posts and then generate angsty posts by some creative replacing as I'm going. Hmm... sounds like at least one of my other projects.

Comments

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, LJ is really about gossip. And gossip about people that you don't know and don't care about is really, really boring. (Well, unless you're going for some flavor of schadenfreude; then reading about people you don't know can be strangely fascinating.)

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Oh, and don't forget the memebots to go along with your angstbots. Run a Turing test to determine whether randomly-answered quizzes are distinguishable from those answered by users with an actual personality...

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I just don't have that much gossip nowadays. Maybe that's the problem. Working too hard and with a girlfriend in 3500 miles away kind of cuts it down. Perlick's coming to visit at the end of March, gossipgossip. Well, not really gossipgossip, but he is coming to visit.

Hmm.

It might be interesting to use LJ to generate affective models. Take a bunch of posts from random LJs labelled with moods. Then extract all the posts that meet a given mood. Split your set for that mood fifty/fifty, and use half as a positive example and all the other labelled moods as negative examples to train a support vector machine. Then take your remaining half to check how accurate you were. I don't think we'd get results on all of them, but my gut feeling is we might be able to get something out of it, and it could tie into some research I'm doing right now. Hmmm. datawar are you listening? I wonder if we might be able to swing this as a class project.

[lucylane.livejournal.com]

there's some moron on *your* friends page talking about some stupid trip to bath or somewhere. what a lame friend. you should definitely quit hanging out with that freak...

[cyberlyra.livejournal.com]

well we could START some interesting gossip.


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