revenge of the auto bots

There's been quite a bit in the news today about the new T&Cs for Google and the aggregation of some 70 different sets of conditions, spread across a whole raft of intertwined software.

I've previously wondered what happens as the marketplace consolidates down to a few main players and the degree to which various things overlap.

In my case there's been another system which has changed ownership/branding/software recently. Its called Twaitter and I used to use it to drive some robotic twittering based upon a few of the characters from my novel, "The Triangle".

So @trianglejake, @trianglebigsy, @chuckmanners and @triangleclare would send each other little messages on fairly long timer loops (measured in days, weeks and months).

And it sort of worked for the last couple of years. They all got followers (more than me in some cases) and I shipped a few copies of the book.

Of course, I could't resist a couple of extra characters just for fun - Mr Bubble @bubbleOoO - which just tweets strings of OOOooos and Mr Tic-Tac, which sends occasional updates on the number of tic-tacs being consumed.

I'd originally set them all up as experiments and they happily babbled away until recently.

"Twaitter is now Gremln."

Everything is supposed to have been transferred across seamlessly (anyone remember Haloscan?)

I can see the various ex twaitter accounts in Gremln.

I can even open the special new control panels.

But that's about it. I can't stop the messages, change them and some of Mr Bubble's are even appearing as if they have been generated by rashbre central - which to me is a sort of privacy infringement.

Don't let the cute little logos fool you, I suspect there is a missing letter in Gremln.