GooglyMinotaur

~ the eulogy ~

Capitol Records signed the contract in April 2001 and the bot went live on 4 June, one day before Radiohead's Amnesiac reached the shops. It was named GooglyMinotaur after the weeping minotaur on the album sleeve, and it existed as a screen name on AOL Instant Messenger rather than as a website. You added it to your buddy list the way you would add a person, and then you typed at it.

It answered tour questions and band trivia, and it would play hangman with you when the conversation stalled. Whatever exclusive material the label was willing to hand out that week came through it as well. It also talked back, in a flat unimpressed register that the writers had worked on, and a good share of its traffic was teenagers trying to make it break character.

The volume was the part nobody had planned for. By November 2001 Capitol was issuing press releases about it: 387,000 buddy lists and more than 36 million messages received. The campaign got extended through the summer tour because the thing would not stop being used. Across its whole run it handled about 60 million messages from nearly a million different people.

The idea came from inside the band. In the oral history the AV Club published years later, the ActiveBuddy people remember Jonny and Colin Greenwood asking for a bot of their own after seeing SmarterChild, which went up on the same network in the same month. Capitol's new media department, run by Robin Sloan Bechtel and Jennifer Bird, took it from there.

~ the dossier ~

~ the network it lived on ~

AIM was the whole premise, and AIM is why this one passed Turkey by. Amnesiac was not distant at all: I was seventeen, and those two records were what the slightly older university crowd played at you until you gave in. The buddy list the bot shipped on was another matter. Everyone I knew was on ICQ and then on MSN Messenger, and an AOL screen name was something you saw in an American film. The band got through and its chatbot did not, for no better reason than which messenger the country had settled on.

~ what it was made of ~

ActiveBuddy wrote it in BuddyScript, the company's own language for instant-messaging agents, and opened the developer site a year later so other people could build the same thing. Nothing in GooglyMinotaur learned anything. It was a large hand-written tree of patterns and replies sitting on a database of band facts, which is why it held its tone so well and why it fell over the moment you asked it something nobody had anticipated.

The company had a better-known product running on the same stack. SmarterChild appeared in June 2001 too and outlived its Radiohead sibling by six years. ActiveBuddy renamed itself Conversagent and then Colloquis, and sold to Microsoft in 2006. SmarterChild was switched off in September 2008.

~ the last message ~

In March 2002 the screen name stopped being a bot and became an obituary. Anybody who messaged it got back a note reading, in part: "Since his catapult into buddy-hood, GooglyMinotaur has sent about 60 million IM messages to nearly 1 million different people. Always dependable and infinitely wise, Googly seemed fitter and happier up until his very last days. At this time, reports state the cause of death is undetermined."

"Fitter Happier" is a track on OK Computer, so the joke was written by somebody who knew the catalog. No reason was ever published. The album cycle that commissioned it had run its course, and the bot was decommissioned along with the rest of the campaign materials. It had been answering for nine months.

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