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A Weavr is essentially a smart avatar, a fictional character that you create, with any attributes you like. You then set your character free online, to roam the internet for information relevant to those attributes. According to the parameters you have set, it will return with images, tweets, blog posts and even venue details as it lives its digital life. "It started really as a wild idea," says David Bausola of Philter Phactory. "The biggest users of the internet are bots, so we wanted to give people their own bots. One of my early ones is based on Inspector Morse. The internet's full of stuff about Morse, so my bot constantly trawls the internet for mentions of Oxford, or the murder scenes, or Morse's favorite pubs, and brings them back to me. It's creating its own narrative."

Technology Review published by MIT, describes an experiment which shows bots may not simply be a form of irritation. The research project started when a group of freelance web researchers created "sophisticated Twitter bots, dubbed 'socialbots,' that can not only fool people into thinking they are real people, but also serve as virtual social connectors, speeding up the natural rate of human-to-human communication."