Aug 21

“Project Upstream”

Random :: Posted on: August 21st, 2008 - 4:03 am EDT

Today I was going about my business when I received an instant message on AIM from the screen name TorchedTrout, with a seemingly random question:

TorchedTrout: What is your purpose in living?

Naturally I was rather intrigued by this, so I played along and sent a response which was somewhat serious. After a bit of idle smalltalk I asked the user on the other side how they got my screen name. It turns out that there exists a group who has created quite an interesting project/experiment, it seems to be known as Project Upstream. It’s a fairly interesting concept which involves randomly connecting AIM screen names which have essentially been data-mined from the profiles of various social websites. More information can be found at http://community.livejournal.com/themissinghat/profile and if you just want to add your screen name to be potentially randomly messaged you can do so here (although I’d recommend at least taking a look at the first link). Apparently this has been going on since mid 2006, but it must be relatively unknown if it’s taken me until now to hear about it