Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

I read today about MyCyberTwin, “a website that allows you to create virtual personalities that can chat for you online.” At first blush, it looks like it’s a system where you can set up what makes me think of a personalized Eliza (tho not necessarily with the therapist angle)…. an IM ‘bot of sorts that you can train to give canned answers to questions. From LifeHacker:

Web site MyCyberTwin lets you create your own personal IM chatbot that you can customize and teach to mimic your personality.

[snip]

After you create your CyberTwin, you can answer a series of questions to make it more like you through the MyClassroom section … A tool like this could come in really handy if it filtered the important questions to you and took care of the rest itself. I know, it’d be weird-ish, but as a site somewhat obsessed with chatbots, this idea has potential!

And from TechCrunch:

The company, which is based in Australia, creates an online “clone” of users based on a 79 question personality quiz and hundreds of additional training questions. Once it’s complete, a chat bot is created for that user, which has it’s own web page, can be embedded into MySpace or another website, or can log into Microsoft Messenger on your behalf and pretend to be you.

I wonder if this could be an option (and fun one) for libraries that want to offer IM services but don’t have staffing to cover all hours (how do they handle that sort of thing now?)….