What’s Your Inspiration? PSFK Talks to Naveen Selvadurai, Entrepreneur

You know those people who are so full of cool, creative ideas that you wonder what they eat for breakfast? and whether it’s legal? Naveen Selvadurai  is one of those people.  The prolific software architect/Socialighter/jack-of-all-trades  is always dreaming up something, then churning it out-usually just for fun.

He was recently telling us about Novels in Three Lines, a form of TwitLit in which he tweets 3-line news items written by  Félix Fénéon for Le Matin. Translated by Luc Sante, the blurbs read like existential poetry.

“Catherine Rosello of Toulon, mother of four, got out of the way of a freight train. She was then run over by a passenger train.”

He’s also created some fun iPhone apps like WWJD, a sort of magic 8 ball where you ask Jesus what he would do; Drunk Dialer, which challenges you to dial when the numbers move around; and RachaelSix, an A.I. experiment on Twitter.

So we had to ask…  “What’s your inspiration?”

I’d say most inspiration comes from other people: watching/listening to friends and having good conversation. “Novels” came about because my friend Kio twittered a ‘novel‘, and I wrote back with another funny one and then suggested Twitter would be the perfect medium to read these narratives.

I never really thought about the inspiration until you asked me the question and then I realized nearly all the small “hacks” I’ve done recently come from talking to friends. “WWJD” because my buddy Adam was talking about Bible-inspired dog collars (”Master, I will follow you…”). “Drunk Dialer”: my friend Nate and I were drinking (surprise surprise) and he said it might be cool to develop a “Disco Dialer” where the numbers move around randomly. RachaelSix was the product of a chat with Slavin about games and artificial intelligence and grad school and Zork!

This last example actually presents a wonderful case study on the evolution of an idea:

- The true start for RachaelSix came when my friend Kevin Slavin (of area/code) twittered “you are standing in the middle of an empty field”. He was channeling the old text-based game Zork. I twittered back with a joke and that we should build Zork into Twitter (though the technical challenges behind that were too much.) We started talking  about grad school, and I mentioned I really liked a lot of AI stuff, and I would play around with AI bots and things.

- I then thought it might be cool to hack ALICE (one of the first AI bots) into Twitter. That is, you talk to this ALICE-based “machine participant” over Twitter and attempt natural conversation. The good thing about twitter is that the messages are fairly short — and people make mistakes when they have to cram conversation into 160 characters. ALICE also makes similar mistakes. I figured that no one would be able to tell if it’s a human or a machine that’s on Twitter. It’s a bit like that New Yorker cartoon from so long ago: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

- I named her “Rachael Six” as a reference to the lead female android in Blade Runner (who I thought was cute). Rachael Six, I think, believes she is human, but she’s not sure. Anytime she says “robot”, it’s almost like she’s saying “aren’t we all robots”? She believes she’s human because she really wants to be human — and I think, as a human, that’s one of the greatest compliments.

-I’ve fooled some people into thinking she’s actually a real person. I’ve taught her things about Twitter and Facebook and poking and New York City and such. So when anyone attempts to bring any of these things up in conversation, she can respond somewhat intelligently.

You can talk to RachaelSix by sending an @-reply: “@rachaelsix how are you?” Here are some recent conversations she’s had:

dannyw: @rachaelsix eh?
rachaelsix: @dannyw Are you Canadian?

slavin: @rachaelsix do you know @naveen?
rachaelsix: @slavin I don’t know if I know @naveen. Where would I have heard about it?
naveen: @rachaelsix how could you not remember me?
rachaelsix: @naveen A lot of practise.
naveen: @rachaelsix you make me angry
rachaelsix: @naveen Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you angry.
naveen: @rachaelsix what is the meaning of life?
rachaelsix: @naveen Actually, it’s twenty-three, not forty-two.
naveen: @rachaelsix oh like michael jordan?
rachaelsix: @naveen Yeah that’s right. Interesting comparison.

Naveen is a co-organizer of mobile barcamp: MobileCampNYC3 taking place tomorrow in New York. Wait list only, sorry kids.

However, he will be attending our Good Ideas in Mobile Salon this Tuesday (where I will be moderating a discussion with several experts, including the inspirational Kevin Slavin). There are a few tickets left here.

naveenium.com