Almost certainly. It'll be hilarious while it lasts though. The name alone cracks me up. Unfortunately they've dropped the ball by not having a painfully trendy logo with a cartoon girlfriend sitting on a cloud or something.
They should open source it when it gets banned so the fun can continue.
EDIT: just realised - this is basically a more benign version of that "sockpuppet management" stuff we've been seeing recently. Is this the start of the rise of the bots within human society?
Basshunter's Boten Anna came out in 2006 I think. But yes, the rise of bots on our networks is inevitable. And they do not have to fool everyone all of the time, only some for brief periods of time. On-line communication is already formulaic and does not require a long attention span.
Really, this is just Eliza with a slick new cloud API.
Unless of course they don't violate the ToS and instead have a real person be your 'cloud' girlfriend.
If you mechanical turk out the role of the girl friend to a human using the same sort of technology that lets a chicken play tic-tac-toe [1] then presumably you can finesse the ToS.
Next we'll see a new startup for providing plausible deniability for ToS violations, basically you send someone a device with the instructions "When this light goes on push the button, if you keep your average response time under 5 minutes for the month we'll pay you $10."
I'm pretty sure this takes outsourcing a step or two too far.
Personally, I'm hoping it's some kind of social experiment, and they're going to come out with some OKCupid-style expository blog posts in a few months.
(If anyone's seriously considering this, do ask yourself if it's really going to make you happy ...)
The idea that you would actually want this for the social interaction never occurred to me. My first reaction was that this was the next generation of
1) "I have a girlfriend!"
2) "Great! Can I meet her?"
3) "Uh no, she lives far away"
4) "Oh. Then how did you meet?"
5) "Um, summer camp?"
6) "Suuurrrre."
Edit: I still don't understand HN's line break formatting.
Blank lines separate paragraphs.
Text after a blank line that is indented by
two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim.
(This is intended for code.)
Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized,
if the character after the first asterisk isn't
whitespace.
Urls become links, except in the text field
of a submission.
Does that answer your question? You get a line break by leaving a blank line.
Great, now when I see those insipid Microsoft ("To the cloud!") commercials, I'll envision some lonely guy with a bottle of lotion, logging into Facebook.
if they can pull it off (terms of service violations and what not) this will be brilliant, it is just a viral bomb ready to go off the things that can happen. I see chat roulette like kind of infamy very quickly.
