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from the all-I-got-was-this-stupid-T-shirt dept.
Caitlin Dewey writes in the Washington Post that she's been using a new service called "Invisible Boyfriend" and that she's fallen in love with it. When you sign up for the service, you design a boyfriend (or girlfriend) to your specifications. "You pick his name, his age, his interests and personality traits. You tell the app if you prefer blonds or brunettes, tall guys or short, guys who like theater or guys who watch sports. Then you swipe your credit card — $25 per month, cha-ching! — and the imaginary man of your dreams starts texting you." Invisible boyfriend is actually boyfriends, plural: The service’s texting operation is powered by CrowdSource, a St. Louis-based tech company that manages 200,000 remote, microtask-focused workers. "When I send a text to the Ryan number saved in my phone, the message routes through Invisible Boyfriend, where it’s anonymized and assigned to some Amazon Turk or Fivrr freelancer. He (or she) gets a couple of cents to respond. He never sees my name or number, and he can’t really have anything like an actual conversation with me." Dewey says that the point of Invisible Boyfriend is to deceive the user’s meddling friends and relatives. "I was newly divorced and got tired of everyone asking if I was dating or seeing someone," says co-founder Matthew Homann. "There seems to be this romance culture in our country where people are looked down upon if they aren't in a relationship."
Evidence suggests that people can be conned into loving just about anything. There is no shortage of stories about couples carrying on “relationships” exclusively via Second Life , the game critic Kate Gray recently published an ode to “Dorian,” a character she fell in love with in a video game, and one anthropologist argues that our relationships are increasingly so mediated by tech that they’ve become indistinguishable from Tamagotchis. “The Internet is a disinhibiting medium, where people’s emotional guard is down,” says Mark Griffiths. “It’s the same phenomenon as the stranger on the train, where you find yourself telling your life story to someone you don’t know.” It’s not exactly the stuff of fairytales, concludes Dewey. "But given enough time and texts—a full 100 are included in my monthly package—I’m pretty sure I could fall for him. I mean, er … them."
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday January 27 2015, @10:22PM
Hmm 2210 UTC, time for VLM's standup comedy routine.
"Good Evening Soylents, did you all hear about the new startup called Invisible Girlfriend? The FTC regulators made them change the name to Invisible Wife, because theres no sex!" Well maybe I'll forget all this standup comedy stuff and stick to computer thingies.
It was either that concept, or something along the lines of chicks like to complain about their boyfriends being insensitive / lazy / excessively gassy so the perfect imaginary boyfriend wasn't living up to the expectations, or whatever.
One thing I don't understand is when Turk was newish or newer or trendy or not tired, I had meatspace buddies who thought it a HILARIOUS game to try to turk faster than they can drink. So you turk $1.10 of parenting psychological surveys and you drink no more than $1.10 of beer or whatever. God only knows what happens to their turk reputation when they're transcribing blueprints for nuclear reactors or filling out psychological surveys after a dozen beers. Anyway back on topic I can just picture one of those dudes after 11 bottles of liquid courage turking as virtual boyfriend and asking the chick for a nude selfie, or sending her a sausage pix, or giving her the true boyfriend experience by drunkenly texting her that he banged her best female friend. I wonder how the company works around this. I've read some funny 4chan / halfchan threads along the lines of "this chick just texted me out of the blue, dubs controls what I text back", and I can just imagine those guys gaining access to this service. I wonder if the company is in the business of telling chicks what they want to hear, if they only allow female turkers to respond, after all no one knows what a woman wants better than another woman. Maybe they'll let me watch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @10:27PM
Stop calling them chicks. Bitches hate that.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday January 27 2015, @11:25PM
Yeah, but I love me some haters.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 28 2015, @09:42AM
'bitch' is a swear word, and i fucking hate it when people swear!