The Netherlands is somewhat of a test market for services around Instant Messenger, Microsoft's chat client.

With 4 million active IM users in a country of 15 million, IM is incredibly popular, and becoming a mass medium in its own right. Microsoft is now starting to give out licenses for commercial "chatbots" that users can add to their buddy list.

Dutch banks already have started to use the service: Postbank and SNSBank ran trials in which IM users could get account information within the IM chat -- just by typing in questions like "How much money do I have?" The system would recognize most natural-language questions around such a defined topic.

The city of Utrecht ran a campaign in which IM users could ask natural-language questions about local events.

One of the most ambitious projects (launched this week) is Eccky, an IM game around a virtual baby that two users have to take care of during six days. It costs EU 1.50 ($1.80) to make a baby, and then you get a daily "allowance" to take care of it by providing virtual food and clothes. And of course you can spend additional money on branded toys, clothes, and food -- plus you have to give your virtual baby a lot of attention.

That's where the ingenuity of the thing comes into play: The Eccky chatbot can respond to chat lines with some 45,000 different answers around 3,500 recognized topics.

The first 10,000 users that bought an Eccky generated 15 million chats during the six days of the game, and bought 250,000 different virtual articles. The chatbot in fact does such a good job in understanding the natural-language lines it receives that many of its young players never realize it is not a person they are spending time with. (Eccky is scheduled for an international launch in 2006, but already can chat in English now.)

I asked Yme Bosma, project manager for Eccky at Media Republic, about the option to offer news to Eccky users, and he confirmed that the conversations of this virtual creature -- Eccky grows up during the game to adulthood -- could be made topical, and filled with actual happenings.

Photo credit: Yme Bosma

So, financial and tourist information, social games -- what else can you do with an IM chatbot?

News is indeed a good option.

Dutch newspaper Volkskrant has been the first to launch its own IM messenger service, called Nieuwskraker, this week. Once you add Nieuwskraker to your buddy list, you automatically get a single news update when you log in, and then get automatic breaking news alerts in the chat environment. Additionally, you can ask for news at any moment by typing in some set queries -- and Nieuwskraker also will do archive searches on any word you type in.

The service is pretty crude in that it only offers four different news
queries: headlines, archive, and "remarkable news" (which links to video clips in the category "miscellaneous"), and you have to know the words to type in to get access to those.

No suggestion of artificial intelligence here; even basic natural-language queries are not understood.

The service tries to present a "chatty" feel anyway, by adding some inane sentences now and then like "Terribly interesting topic! This is what I found."

You have to accept one commercial message per week; there are no paid services connected to it.

But it is still a very interesting service! The chattering masses are a new mass medium after all.

Originally written by Monique Van Dusseldorp
as "IM as your News Messenger"
on Poynter E-Media Tidbits