No, I’m not talking about a parody of the book. I’ve recently come to a crossroads with an IM bot that descends from an older code called TheGreatHatsby. In a nutshell, this code crawls social websites like twitter, digg, livejournal, etc to find two AIM accounts, then connects them via anonymous chat. Newer versions of the bot make the masked screen name appear as (adjective)Salmon, (adjective)Trout, or (adjective)Coho, depending on what social site it found you on. The first time I was connected through this bot was after updating my old blogger, and I got an (adjective)Trout name. Both of us were confused, but I thought nothing of it. This continued to happen, and I eventually did some research which led me to this website. Apparently, a shady group called Project Upstream created these fish-bots as a “social experiment.” Intrigued by the notion of conversing with strangers, I entered my AIM sn into their website to instigate an anonymous conversation. Surprisingly, the stranger and I hit it off, chatting about video games, music, sports and other what-not. A nice change of tone from the previous anonymous fish-bot chats which ranged from “Dude, you IMed me. Who are you?” to “You are hacked man. Scan your computer.” While chatting with this stranger last night, he told me about a website called Omegle. It basically does the same thing as the fish-bots: anonymous chat, but both parties are participating willingly, which makes for better conversations. I think it’s a great concept, and I plan on starting a few conversations with strangers in the near future to see how it goes. You should too.