Mostly holes - part 3 : To find good Baby-SITAs

In the last part, an enormous amount of work was presented
... and some little benefit, you might get back...

It is highly improbable to get a bigger number of people to
work on something that abstract and sacrifice a big portion of
their spare time for something that might never work out.

... sounds depressing? Don't worry ... we'll get them ;-)

Cheap tricks that might work once more...

In the dark times before I learnt about the joy of LaTex (not what you think - follow the link), I was using a student version of Microsoft Office 2000 along with its Office Assistant.

It wasn't, that I needed much help of it and seldom asked anything but I found the animations tremendously funny - just look yourself - I would recomend "Print" and "Empty Garbage".

SITA's chance might be to be around just like Link, the cat, was on my desktop.

Today that would mean a good written browser plugin - but in the end it should work more or less like back then...

Example of an interaction

• When the browser starts up, SITA might give you a short update what has happened on the net since the last time, you had a look
• It might fetch some RSS feeds, compare it with other users if they found it interesting etc.
• ... it might even do horrible stuff like looking if somebody has nudged you on facebook and stuff like that - whatever it takes to attract some babySITAs
• The user is mildly interested and starts his day with the news - he scrolls down and starts read an article
• SITA might look over his shoulder, see, that the focus is on an article about a big train accident and would stroll off into the net to see if some other user has commented on this or found additional infos
• It might "come back" and tell the user about its findings or - when he feels brave enough and hasn't bothered its owner for a while it might start to ask what he looks at and what the vocabulary means, it doesn't know yet...

It takes all kinds

• Some of you might already think "Oh, that sounds a bit too much - I just want to surf the net - don't you dare asking me things every 2 minutes"
• It would be a total disaster when the users would feel that way.
• Therefore SITA would have to be patient, uncomplainant and if it wants to start a dialog, it should do so in an unintrusive way like "Meeeow" - see the cat above with "GetAttention"
• The user on the other hand should have the opportunity to encourage SITA to do more or make him stay quiet for a while (and more often in the long run).
• It's a bit like the old Petz games or Black and White in that way, where you get other results relatively to the actions you treat the thing with.

Teaching an old Cat/Dog/Paperclip new tricks

• As long as the user doesn't have some real advantages, he won't install such a "code monster"
• Therefore we need THE KILLER FEATURE
• For the audience we target prominently (geeks) this might be something like "Sita - fetch me some comics"
• And Sita opens up all the comics, the user normally watches, in seperate browser taps - but not the ones, he has already read today.
• In order to do such a specific task with these constraints someone has to be quite smart about it
• At the start, this hasn't got to be SITA but a user, that has trained/programmed SITA to do that exact trick...
• When more and more of these tricks are implemented, the users will try to extract the things, that SITA has to keep an eye on.
  Once the tricks have a trivial part, that changes, and a common part with some more difficult logic a new trick can be implemented a bit faster and when a clear pattern emerges at some point probably by SITA itself.