Comments on: Random friend seeking on Google Talk?

By: Runit

Runit — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:20:53 +0000

I dont know what it is but i can tell you that i have myself done a lot of random ppl chatting. i used to find them on yahoo members directory. i had my own motives , my plots. but it was all basically cause i wasnt really dealing with solitude very well. so the best thing i thought i could do was chat to random ppl. a lot of times i ended finding interesting ppl at times even ppl who would humour whatever i had in mind ( could be ugly at times ).

By: Ploum

Ploum — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:53:08 +0000

Years ago, I had the same problem with my ICQ account (it was around 1999-2000).

When I completed my profile, I choosed “unspecified” for the gender and I entered a random 4 letters word for my first name.

I then received a lot (really a lot) of new contacts, meanly from Pakistan. Some of them where even sexually explicit. After a few weeks, I asked one of the spammer “why”. He explained me than the random four letters I typed was a very popular surname for girls in Pakistan. The “unspecified” gender was interpreted as “woman”, guess what’s next..

By: jauricchio

jauricchio — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:27:03 +0000

Haven’t seen that. But I have seen this which is a very neat thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheGreatHatsby

Your “which of these words is a [category]” captcha is cute.

-joe (from summer)

By: Kamil Kisiel

Kamil Kisiel — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:47:51 +0000

I’ve had that happen to me lots of times, especially long ago when I used ICQ, and more recently on Skype. Honestly, some times it’s just people looking for someone to chat with. I’ve had a lot of people from Korea or China message me at random on Skype, and most of the time it’s someone just having fun or wanting to learn English. Usually I get bored of them pretty fast so it never lasts for more than one conversation. Occasionally I have made some distant friends that way.

A funny and related story: I actually met my first girlfriend long ago (talk about 10 years or so here… ) through ICQ when it had the “random chat” feature. Turned out she lived down the street, quite a coincidence.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:47:47 +0000

For completeness, I’ve not seen this. Nor do I have settings so that random people can IM me. If I want to talk with someone, I’ll have added them in to my contacts list already, or have means to do so.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:44:15 +0000

Paranoia is always a good default.

Finding friends is why you get involved in projects or go outside your house; not IM random people on the intarwebs.

By: emory

emory — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:22:29 +0000

i get that all the time on all my accounts. some site got your account, and then they copied to profile onto an international friend-finding site, which gets copied onto another one, ad nauseum, and after a while people start contacting you for no discernible reason.

you’ll probably start getting spammed at some point, which really sucks, although some of the people talking to you are probably completely normal, if a little lame. it’s just a common sense thing about what you shouldn’t tell them about yourself.

By: Carl Hamlin

Carl Hamlin — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:17:25 +0000

This has happened to me occasionally for a number of years as well. So far nothing’s ever come of it; I suspect it’s just folks trying to build contacts and going about it in a clumsy manner.

By: Eugenia

Eugenia — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:57:33 +0000

Actually, I find this very interesting. If these are bots, we are looking to some new kind of AI security threat in the future… or just security agencies doing that kind of thing. In any way, that’s very interesting and disturbing at the same time. Thanks for sharing.

By: Zeeshan Ali

Zeeshan Ali — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:37:59 +0000

Happend to me a couple of times and good that i don’t use IM much anymore. Mostly they are just trying to get money out of you somehow. Most of them instantly give up when they realize that the person they are talking to is not an idiot but some of they continue their efforts until it reaches a real dead-end. Believe it or not there are plenty of people on this planet who easily fall for these traps and thats what feed these people.