In January 2005, Erwin Van Lun launched his first book Van Massamerk naar Mensmerk and related book-blog http://www.mensmerk.nl. The book described the next ten years in media, marketing and brands while his weblog focused on daily changes of media, marketing and brands, step-by-step unfolding of his predictions of the future. As the rise of brand agents was a key element of his vision (and still is), as described in his book, and a lot of new (MSN Messenger) chatbots were launched in 2005, examples of ancient brand agents, he decided to create a separate page on his website: www.mensmerk.nl/chatbots.html, a listing of all chatbots in the Netherlands and a selection of chatbots worldwide. Soon, this page became the most popular page of his site.
When he defined his futurist and professional speaker strategy back in 2007, he decided that these chatbot pages wouldn’t fit into the new version of Mensmerk.nl and its English equivalent (www.erwinvanlun.com). Therefore, after the launch of his new websites in September 2007, these pages weren’t part of the website navigation anymore, however still available via search engines and still ranked very high. This made him think and he started to work on a new concept: Chatbots.org. Erwin continued to work on Chatbots.org where he did all technical modifications by himself. Just as a kind of hobby.
Chatbots.org had its soft launch in January 2008. Edwin van Asch assisted Erwin during these days and jointly they had entered 100 chatbots on March 30th, 2008. Chatbots.org was finally launched in April that year. On May 3rd, 2008, it obtained a Google Page Rank of 3 and on May 21th, 2008 it obtained Page Rank 4.
In February of 2009, during the setup of his office in Sydney Erwin realized that the economic crisis forced companies to reduce costs and he expected that chatbots would gain more attention again, the third wave so to say. That’s why he started to focus on a business plan and he soon found his new partner Boris Toet of Score-Advertising who appeared to be a very talented sparring-partner in use available technology such as php, javascript and CSS.
Version 2.0 was launched May 11th, 2009. All functionalities were developed keeping Chatbots.org’s new mission in mind: “To be the leading community of chatbot developers, academics and users focusing on research, technology and innovation to drive success for all participants.”. Within this version, business news and community information tabs were introduced. Furthermore, it allowed people to register on the site and to build public profiles. It was also the introduction of the first version of the pseudo 3D header. On June 4th, Chatbots.org obtained Google page rank 5.
Version 2.5 was launched August 17th 2009. It featured all chatbots and/ or related AI awards, a special ‘feature profiles’ section highlighting everyone who has willingly shared their AI knowledge and a brand new design of the Chatbots.org header. From a design point of view it included an animated favicon and cute Twitter animation. On top, the speed of the website was considerably increased.
