I like connecting with people. My initial steps into the social media world (Twitter, mostly) were enjoyable in a lot of ways. I connected with funny and nice people I wouldn’t have known otherwise. That seems to be what does it for me — funny, nice. I feel better about things, about the world, when I am around people like that.

This initial group of people I interacted with felt like a community, at least for a short while. I miss that part of it. Yes, we’re around, but we’re not really glued together in any meaningful way.

Twitter is a weird beast to me, and has been for a couple years. It’s like having the radio on in the background. It’s a station you have chosen to dial into, but one you actively listen to intermittently, and often times aren’t paying particularly close attention to at all. Every once in a while you catch something on the periphery of your senses, and zero in, and maybe even briefly engage with a person or a group of people.

It’s not an enriching experience for me. But can it be?

My life is busy, and so are all your lives. That we don’t connect, or that I don’t feel a part of something, is just something I feel, and really no one’s problem but my own.

But, I can choose how I interact with people, and here’s where we get to my idea. I think it’s probably a bad idea. But here it is.

1. I pick a single Twitter use to interact with over the course of 7 days.
2. Any tweet that would I have normally sent out to everyone will be directed only to this user.
3. I will make a point to read and comment on this user’s tweets.
4. I will still be able to interact with other people on Twitter.
5. I will not write more than 50 tweets towards my selected user over the course of those 7 days (unless there happen to be interactions and ongoing conversations with them that would inflate that number)
6. If they ask me for whatever reason to stop, I will stop.

What could be the result of this?

• We make a connection, or further strengthen an existing connection.
• I come across as a nuisance, and they ask me to stop, or block me, file a cease-and-desist order, etc.
• No net effect.

Other potential side-effects:
My non sequiturs normally thrown out into common space might come across strangely to a singled-out user.
“Why are you telling me this, and what, exactly, is this?”

So, this project… How would I feel if someone picked me out, and someone did this P2P thing to me?

Man, I don’t know. It could be nice. It could be annoying. It could be a little creepy. It could be all three.

I guess you can choose me for your own P2P project and we’ll see what happens.