Turns out it’s a social networking fish bot (not to be confused with a phish bot) which randomly connects two AIM ID’s together and gives a spurious message to both to get the conversation flowing as well as much hilarity as one accuses the other of initiating the conversation.

After much confusion and then amusement, I had a lovely chat with my random person – a 26 year old film major from San Francisco who loves The Smiths and Joy Division – about everything from the current economic climate to the fact that we both love music from the decade we were born rather than stuff that is around now and how Americans get rather confused about how Britain, the UK, England, Scotland and Wales all fit together.

It was random and totally anonymous but ultimately harmless and rather fun. It also highlighted for me that the world isn’t as big as you sometimes may think and the internet can be brilliant and surprising.

More links:
The AIM FishBot Phenomenon
Got a random IM message?
AIM Fish (not Phish) bots
Project Upsteam Screen Names
The Missing Hat

Cool little utility and easy to add to Flickr, eBay, MySpace etc. with some of the sites preconfigured for the newbies.