Robots make the best friends. Except, we make robots that give us filter bubbles, algorithms which present back to us the same view of the internet that we already know.
I've been reading about Mahout and thinking about recommendation engines since late last year. A few years ago I built a smart chat bot which had the power to guess. I made other robots which were even simpler, doing one thing well.
Whilst I worryee about the filter bubble I'm trapped in, at least I can use robots to help discover what I might be missing, in a kind of inherent and stupid serendipity.
Castor and Pollux are two such robots, who visit websites and find things that I should be reading, but most probably missed. They each have a personality, a preference for certain kinds of stories, and that's reflected in the content they post.
What they find is temporary. They wake up and roll up a dice before deciding whether to help me out. There is no archive of their discoveries, no record of where they go. I want them to be casual, copacetic, and random, see?