A virtual girlfriend?
Just saw this posted on boingboing.net:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/23/virtual_cellular_gir.html
Here is the bbc news article for this.
And the press release.
After reading it, I thought, what is this world coming to?
Is this the new breed of that “tamogitchi” fad that was about many years ago? You feed it, and care for it and it’ll react kindly towards that action, whilst neglecting it will cause a negative reaction. Or in this case, you spend on the girl, and she will reward you.
It is worse than the tamogitchi though because you are going to be spending to buy the gifts and the annual subscription.
Yes, i’m sure it has good intentions, and is likely to be targetted at the young mid 20′s single guys out there.
But honestly though, I couldn’t see this type of thing take off, especially in western countries such as Australia, UK, America and so on… There’d just be a huge backlash from various diffrent groups of individuals.
At first I actually thought it was a Japanese thing (Japan already has many services utilising their 3G network, and many of which I would consider a bit odd/weird), but reading on, it looks like it’s actually a Hong Kong “innovation”.
I seem to recall reading a news article (hey, I’m an information sponge, I remember a lot of information and I read a lot) about a device available in Japan utilising the 3G network to locate others in your nearby vicinity who are your “match”. I mean, that alone is kind of scary. Not exactly sure how it works and all, but it probably tries to match you up with someone with interests that match yours. Sounds much akin to a dating service.
The mind boggles as to where this kind of technology will lead to… If, of course, we’re assuming it does go places…
This whole social engineering area that has been given a run for it’s money lately with firstly, Friendster.com, Orkut, and a few others really is an area that will be explored, and may well be exploited by someone out there. There are of course benefits for it, like finding old friends from many years ago that you have since lost touch with, however, there are also others who use it for other purposes that you may here about once in awhile in the news. Yep, that’s stalkers.