There's a lot of potential in running a group avatar, and running a bot on behalf of the group is done a lot in the IRC world. See Infobot for example.

What I'm thinking of here is a bot that embodies the group presence itself, and acts as cement for that in the more pairwise world of desktop IM (eg AIM). Organising votes when there's a quorum, for example, or collaborative to-do lists. Perhaps a way of group-consulting desktop calendars which is chat (which is easier than mode-switching) -- also this is really a desktop avatar rather than group avator. I definitely want to build one of those...

2003-09-14