Why 10% of Your Friends on Twitter and Facebook Will Be Nonhuman in Five Years

How many of your "friends" on Facebook and Twitter are real? According to a new report by Gartner, one in every ten of your online friends will be nonhuman by 2015. That's not to say we'll be tweeting with zombies or playing FarmVille with ET. Gartner predicts the coming of "social bots"--automated tools used by brands and organizations to engage consumers. "Efforts to systematize and automate social engagement will result in the rise of social bots--automated software agents that can handle, to varying degrees, interaction with communities of users in a manner personalized to each individual," the report reads.