Control Someone’s Behavior for an Hour with Mod My Life
Mark Hendrickson
30 comments »
This has to be the most amusing website I’ve come across for quite sometime. Mod My Life is a twist on the lifecasting idea pioneered by JustinTV. Whereas with JustinTV you can eavesdrop into the lives of dozens of people, and chat with them if you like as well, Mod My Life lets you to watch people’s lives for hour-long segments at a time and command them to do things.
The word “lives” should be put in quotes because these are actually performers (actors, improve artists, comedians, etc.) who have volunteered to give up control of their behavior to an internet audience. The site has been out as public beta since launching at the NY Video Meetup this past Monday, although currently they hold only one or two sessions, or modcasts, per day. The next will transpire at 8pm ET tonight.
I sat in on a modcast yesterday evening and was very impressed by the modstars’ intent on carrying out their instructions faithfully. I first watched a guy named Wilder roam a crowded mall and undertake the antics suggested to him by the handful of spectators on the site. Soon after submitting “do the robot”, there he was on my screen doing the robot in real time and around real people who had no clue he was being controlled by the internet. Among other submitted instructions were “tell someone ‘dude you gotta heal me, I’m losing life points!’” and “cry like a little kid: I wost my mommy! I can’t find my mommy!”. The organizers of Mod My Life relayed the top suggestions to the modstar every few minutes via cell phone, and we could watch him carry the instructions out in both first-person and third-person camera views.
The second modstar, named Micah, walked the streets of New York City trying to get strangers to sing with him, a street vendor to sell his entire street-side store, and a cab driver to take him only one block down the road. We’ve embedded a video segment of his modcast below where he asks strangers to rate him on a scale of 1-10.
Co-founder Andrew Keidel says that the site currently has 20 recurring modstars and about 100 people from a variety of countries interested in performing, currently for free but in the future with compensation. He foresees increasing the number of modcasts per day, as well as the number of locations. The most visitors to the site at one time has been 50 but they’ve built the site with an eye for scalability, so they hope to host potentially thousands of spectators at a time. Future features will include an archive section for past modcasts, various types of embeds (for recorded clips and for watching live performances elsewhere on the web), profile pages for modstars, and themes for modcasts so they aren’t always completely random.
Now this is just silly.
This site is awesome!
Good stuff
It sure is easy to just discount this idea as stupid and silly, but I really think it could be a lot of fun both in terms of just purely a comedy video site and a community interaction site. Most of the sites that the average Internet user uses are for leisure purposes anyway (MySpace, Facebook, etc.). If they can scale this well and make it go viral it could almost turn into a popular event such as American Idol is on TV yet with true interaction for fans aside of just being able to vote for the participants.
FYI - they presented at the NY Video Meetup this week - I captured their product demo - check it out here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ember-2007
It’s cute for an hour - then it gets boring quick.
Can I ask for sexual favors?
#6 - no - the creator said the actors won’t do anything illegal or “weird”
This is just ludacris. People have to much time on their hands, to the volunteers receive any compensation?
Mod My Life is like Justin.tv “challenges” where life casters can stream challenges and stunts based on what the audience wants to see. If Mod My Life would make a widget to embed on the profiles of the already popular life cast sites such as ustream and justin Mod My Life would grow in traffic, reach, and usability.
#7
What are you trying to say?
It seems to me that:
First, there was really bad MTV sitcoms
(we got used to this)
So they made reality TV.
Then there was really bad reality TV
(we got used to this too)
So they made My Mod Life.
…and you know what, it could be the answer to the Writers strike: spontaneous television.
I guess I could get used to it.
I prefer to spend my time controlling my own life instead of somebody else’s. Life is already too short.
Jon
It’ll be huge. It just taps into too many human impulses not to be huge.
> It’ll be huge. It just taps into too many human impulses not to be huge.
What world do you live in? LOL
I didn’t say it tapped the better human impulses. Heh.
Seems somewhat interesting, but I’m not sure it will be viable.
Who the heck are these people?
Good website providing some good information
This idea is just emblematic od the fact that we’re increasingly living in an economy where some otherwise smart people have become “permanently redundant” and cannot find paying work commensurate with their skills and aspirations, so they now are prostituting themselves as digital marionettes to bored people who have too much money and no ideas or talents of their own. This is what happens when the video gamer burnout generation collides with economically-marginalized, entrenched Gen Y slackers.
I would say it’s a sign of the irreversible demise of American civilization.
this site is f@#$ing funny as hell and has unbelievable potential!
Interesting idea. It reminds me of the Die Hard when Bruce was forced to wear a racial insensitive sign in Harlem. I’m not saying it’ll go that way, but I wonder what the limits are.
This reminds me of the book Paul Auster did with Sophie Calle — Double Game — where he dictated to her what she should do and then wrote about it. Pretty famous, well-received book in the literary world. Mod My Life is like the mass market version of the book.
Penelope
Very odd, I don’t understand why modstars would do this; perhaps, other than for a few seconds of fame from a handful of remote users who are commanding them to do something “silly.” And what is the line between “silly” and “weird”? It seems the sole purpose of the web site is for actors to be “weird.” Who else in their right mind would ask strangers in the street to sing with them? Very odd, indeed.
I saw one of the modcasts. The idea seems to have potential but video quality was poor and the actors were not funny at all. I think they need to bring in some better talent. People who will actually engage and interact with random people on the street as opposed to just scaring them.
take a look at this more scientific approach (2003): http://teleactor.berkeley.edu/
Bleh. It’s Trigger Happy TV, or the in-public bits of Dead Ringers, minus the talent - and there was very little talent in those to begin with, only the lack of self-consciousness required to humiliate yourself in public.
Saying something apparently nonsensical like “dude you gotta heal me, I’m losing life points” and getting a confused stare is not funny. If another guy walked into the shot dressed as the Medic from Team Fortess 2 and sprayed the actor with a fire hose, that would be funny, but it would also take preparation, forethought and comedic timing - all the sort of stuff that most people find hard. It used to be that was fine - the 99% of us who didn’t have what it took would watch the 1% who did and the 1% would get paid for their talent in return. But in the new Web 2.0 era the 99% have to give it a go as well.
The suits will love it - remove the comedy from comedy and you don’t have to pay comedians any more. All you need for a show like Jackass or this thing is a complete lack of dignity, and there are millions of checkout jockeys who have what it takes to get their 15 minutes of fame.
It seems one of the big step to social engineering.
There goes my “internetpupput.com”/”internetpuppets.com” idea. Oh well, I hadn’t done anything with the domains for over a year. I think the plural expired too.