Living with robots and interactive companions involves sharing living spaces with robots in domestic environments, work, healthcare and even massively destructed environments. But what about the cyberspace and the internet?

Nowadays, cyberspace is being sucked into our real lives to the extent that it is hard to separate both realities from each other. On daily basis, we are present in the cyberspace realms for considerable periods of time. This don't necessarily mean that we will lose contact with our intelligent companions. Unsurprisingly, existing in cyberspace embraces the existence of robots and other things online. Interactive companions are occasionally in cyberspace and online ready to interact, chat and respond to their fellow humans.

Twitter is a showcase where many “Things” tweet and moreover they have followers. Trees, cats, roasters,and robots update their followers with the latest actions they have been up to [1]. Nasa robot @AstroRobonaut tweets its news and shares opinions and even advices with its followers. doing that, it seems that human writers are responding sometimes instead of the robot. They act as a ghost and interact with others within the robot's social network. Socially communicating with a robot is an appealing idea to have a free communication that offers significant insights about the way people react and / would like to communicate with robots. Human expectations about their interactive intelligent robot friend are easily spotted through these types of social networks.

Facebook and Twitter are nowadays on top of social networking lists. People are drastically involved in socially networking, they put a lot of effort to keep it active and attract new people to their network. The exponential growth of such networking activities are justifiable due to the easiness and convenience of sharing personal data, images, thoughts, info and news ending with creating a rich exchange space. Talking about simplicity and straightforwardness of social networking in getting people to interact with robots with the possibility of ghost writers taking off the communication lead, Wizard of Oz methodology cannot help it but to keep popping. The similarity between WOZ and the ghost writing on the robot's behalf, suggests that probably mating the two approaches could end up in a framework to assess proposed intelligent robotic systems with users on a large scale in a more natural way of communication. Again, allowing people to interact and exchange communication in a non-monitored way will help in getting more natural and true responses from user/followers/friends as opposed to the restriction some users experience when participating in experiments within university or labs premises, which was the reason for creating the robot house to run experiments at [2]. Using this new approach is to be investigated further and incorporated in research

References: [1] http://www.sics.se/~majac/workshop2/position/HenrietteCramer.pdf [2] link to the unpublished robot house article :(