P-Bots

Last week I touched on the subject of the fall of the social networks and raised the question asking what would be the next big thing. Of course there are many big things ahead of us. Telecoupling, mixed reality, the Internet of things, semantic Web,... I could go on and on.

But the question people often ask is what will be the next Facebook. The next single trend that will be very hot and product or service everybody will be using.

The next big thing will be intelligent personal assistants. Or personal robots. Or PBots (Apple will call their version an iBot).

So what exactly will these bots be? They will be personalized automated services acting intelligently on your behalf. Helping you ease the information load and on the other hand making sure you make most of an every bit of that information. We have been using them today already, albeit in a limited fashion. Let me give some examples.

Spam filters are probably the most popular bots today. If you use Gmail you have probably noticed (or not... but this is the point!) the number of unwanted spam messages has gone down. And this is not because spammers are not sending spam anymore. This is because the Google anti-spam bot does an extremely good job on your behalf.

Automated banking transactions and stock trading triggers are bots too. They help you stop thinking about repeating monthly payments and will even buy (or sell) you some stocks based on pre-selected criteria.

I also use a bot called Sniper http://snajper.net) to buy things on auction sites. It has been very effective winning many important items for me when I was away, logged out of the Internet.

But the examples above are just the beginning. Few years from now it will be our P-Bots posting on our Twitter and Facebook streams, chatting with friends (or rather their P-Bots) and watching continuously whether something requires your human attention.