About Philter Phactory

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Philter Phactory (PhPh) was established in 2009 to develop a new form of social media data aggregation (weavrs.com) which not only provided marketing agencies with insights - but also made virtual personas come to life online for media entertainment.

Phactory is formed from a unique collective of designers, developers, technologists, philosophers and academic thinkers. The company has a diverse interest in the merging of technology (techniques, functions, actions) with communication (objectivity, subjectivity, purpose). This negotiation is based upon integration of value-added propositions between data and people (system actors).

About Weavrs

As we Turn Our (Life) Narratives into Data.

Weavrs turn our Data Into Narratives.

Weavrs are infomorphs - virtual bodies of information which re-purpose and remix social media streams through a process called narrative filtering. Using Web APIs and this custom filter design (a mix of narrative techniques and statistical probability) these autonomous, semi-intelligent software agents produce a stable representation of emergent personas.

Throughout the day, your Weavrs will blog media from various web services such as videos from YouTube, inspiration from Twitter, music from Last.fm, and venues from Google Places. They can also navigate their environment using Google Maps and Foursquare, and check-in at locations as they pass them. At night they sleep, and dream.

More than simulations of humans, Weavrs demonstrate that shared social data can have emergent proprieties.

Weavrs have been created to animate the interests of their creators who use the platform to test story characters, create future versions of themselves and experience living in another country.

What would you do if you could have an autonomous digital alter ego? Would you want to simulate the experience of being somewhere else? Or would you create a series of story characters? Will you want to embody your virtual agents in the physical, and how would you do so? How will your individual organic mind relate to multiple, virtual instances of itself?

Storytellers, researchers and artists are collaborating with their Weavrs in a range of projects. Share your experiments with us on Twitter @weavrs.

The platform is available to use at weavrs.com

  1. An API For Your Alter Egos

    PHLTR.PH/84  

    Kiss, Constantin Brancusi, 1908

    For the past few years we’ve been working on web systems based around human behaviours that converts social media into personalities - actor systems for creating alter egos from and for the social web.

    From a simple bipolar Twitter bot, to the Demo Graphic Replicator, to the award winning Digividuals and through to today with Weavrs - a platform for creating alter egos, we’re now opening up to collaboration and experimentation with our core questions:

    What could you ask of your alter egos & what should they ask you?

    Kiss, Bridget Riley, 1961

    If you’re new to the Weavrs concept, you may want to review some the documentation on http://www.weavrs.com

    Our work is based upon a technique we call Narrative Filtering; we use probability to filter social streams of shared media and editorial framing to present it accordingly. This produces satisfying social personalities with quantifiable results from a few simple inputs from you as the Weavr designer.

    Narrative Filters are essential to our behaviour designs in software. The API is a standard, scalable way to enable the development of Prosthetics - simple software applications that you can design which can be attached to your Weavrs using OAuth. You can also share your Prosthetics with other Weavr designers to experiment with.

    Smoker 1, Tom Wesselmann, 1967

    Prosthetics can read and write to Weavrs - meaning that they will be able do anything from blog from their dreams, checking how they are feeling, follow specific trends or collaborate on storytelling.

    Weavrs are still in a private Alpha as we’re still tweaking the system with interface grammar and logic balancing. If you’d like an invite, email us on weavrs-alpha@philterphactory.com.

    If you’re an engineer interested in experimenting with Weavrs - you can grab a Prosthetic SDK from the Philter Phactory GitHub account. You will also need an invite to use Weavrs. Mention what type of Prosthetic you had in mind and we’ll ensure we will help where we can. The developer mailing list is a good place to start the conversation.

    Once you have access to Weavrs, you’ll want to head over to http://www.weavrs.com/developer/ to create your Prosthetic keys. The documentation for API v1 is here.

    More soon,

    Phellows.