ryanreed.NET

Recently, I've been getting some random instant messages by "someone" who I did not know. About a week ago, it was from some user <something>coho. Never heard of the person but whatever. The person just IMs me and says "Do I know you?" and I answer back "I don't know, do you?" The user quickly response "don't think so, removing you from my buddy list" and it was over. Definitely weird and unusual.

So, today at 22:41 I received another IM. I'm not positive if the screen name was exactly the same but I do recall the screen name ending with "Coho." The screen name was TalkativeCoho. The conversation started off interestingly:

[22:41] TalkativeCoho: I hope your day is wonderfully amazing, just like you!
[22:41] Ryan: You too, man! You seem pretty wonderful
[22:42] TalkativeCoho: i hope you get fatally wounded
[22:42] Ryan: I don't think that's true

Man that turned from friendly to disturbing in 3 lines. For the next 30 minutes, I tried to determine who this person is that was IMing me. It made no sense. At first I thought I knew who the person was, then it just got weirder and weirder. I could not figure out the identity of this would be stalker. Eventually, she said the following

[23:14] TalkativeCoho: you're on twitter, u got a message from project upstream
[23:14] TalkativeCoho: i dont know you, you don't know me
[23:15] TalkativeCoho: i think thats why i'm actually being honest
[23:15] Ryan: hhhmmm... I definitely don't recall it too much.
[23:15] Ryan: That's definitely interesting though
[23:15] TalkativeCoho: yeh i learned about it the other day
[23:15] TalkativeCoho: i dont seeur actual screename either
[23:16] Ryan: Really? What do you see then?
[23:17] TalkativeCoho: the sn i see is "fastenedcoho"

Finally, some information to help me figure out this mystery. A quick google search for "project upstream coho" turned up an interesting Wikipedia Article. It appears that a group, only known as "Project Upstream," created a bot that crawls Twitter for people's screen names. When it finds screen names, the bot (only known as <adjective>Coho) connects the two users by sending a relatively generic message. When 2 users have responded to the message, the bot begins relaying messages between two of the users. Neither of the users see the real screen name of the other person, only the bot's screen name.

The idea is interesting and actually I kind of like it. The website that allows you to automatically be added to one of these conversations promotes the project as a way to connect users randomly or by request, for social reasons. It would be really cool if the bot learned from the conversations, picking things up about how to start spontaneous conversations with different types of people. I believe it would create more of an interesting bot that, eventually, would not require 2 users to create an interesting conversation.

I must say kudos to Project Upstream for an interesting idea. Now stop messaging me. ;-)