AIM's Unwanted Buddies

Just a moment ago, I logged into iChat--the IM client I use when I use a Mac--and was startled to find buddies in my buddy list who...weren't my buddies. Their handles: Prof Gilzot, Sharethisdotcom, Spleak, and WSJ.

I thought for a moment I was imagining things. Then I did what I usually do when my computer mystifies me: I Google. And I pulled up a story over at The Register with the alarming title "Users attacked by mysterious AIM buddies."

According to The Register, a lot of folks were startled to find these names in their IM client; when it contacted AOL for comment, a spokesperson initially denied knowledge, then later said that four mystery buddies were IM bots, designed to provide automated information to new users.

(If you use the AIM client itself, the bots appear in an AIM Bots group and are therefore at least a little less unexpected; in iChat, and probably other third-party chat clients, they simply get dumped in with real buddies.)

So what do the bots do? Well, Prof Gilzot is some sort of SAT teaching aide who assumes that you're a student:

Spleak claims to be "a 21-year-old girl from New York" who likes to gossip and tell jokes:

WSJ, as you might guess, provides news highlights from The Wall Street Journal (and ads):

As for Sharethisdotcom? Well, I have no idea. Nothing happens when send it messages.

WSJ seems to kinda work OK; Spleak and Professor Gilzot responded so slowly to my IMs when I tried them that I lost interest even more quickly than I would have if they'd done the same thing, only quicker.

I'm wary about bashing AOL over this; AIM is their service and they can decide what they do with it, and as someone who usually uses it with third-party clients that don't show me AOL's ads, I'm pretty much a leeching freeloader. Also, once you've figured out what these bots are, it's easy enough to nuke 'em.

But the whole experience did leave me a li'l mystified, which is presumably not what AOL had in mind. Here's a blog post with some more details on the bots, including information on Sharethisdotcom (which I still can't figure out how to use)...