What a Twitter bot taught this Philly designer about loneliness

Here’s the setup: you tweet about being lonely.

I’m lonely even when there’s hundreds of people around me

— ?Alyssa? (@alyssaaxxx_) September 22, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsSomeone, somewhere, sees that tweet on The Lonely Project, which searches for the most recent tweets that use the word “I” and “lonely.” That distant someone clicks a button and @aLonelyProject tweets at you.

@alyssaaxxx_ Someone over here wanted you to know that you’re not alone. #lonely #lonelyproject — The Lonely Project (@aLonelyProject) September 22, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

It’s a hybrid Twitter bot/anonymous lifeline dreamed up and built by local designer Lauren Hallden. Hallden, 30, of Port Richmond, built The Lonely Project as part of a Penn independent study.

She built it because she was lonely.

“I was going through a period where at the end of the day I’d have checked all of Twitter and Facebook and I wanted some other connection,” she told Technical.ly Philly. “I just felt lonely and I wanted somewhere I could go and interact with other people who were experiencing the same thing.”

While it hasn’t been “as sticky” as she’d hoped, Hallden did find that people liked getting anonymous tweets from the project (instead of feeling like it was an invasion of privacy, which she worried about). In about four months of the project’s existence, the account has tweeted 1,454 times and has received the following: 496 faves, 351 retweets and 256 replies, Hallden wrote on her blog last month.

“Of the replies, only a handful have amounted to ‘hey bot, fuck off,'” she wrote.

The Lonely Project is a shift from the lighthearted web projects Hallden has created in the past. See: Onling Dating Ipsum, which generates random online dating profile text (“There’s no such thing as a typical Friday night mountain biking nothing too complicated food sleeping late, vinyl records video games bikes new friends passionate about.”); Name My Bar, which creates a random trendy cocktail bar name (we got “Torch & Cordial”); and the now-defunct Penn Squirrels Eat Things Tumblr.

What’s the latest for Hallden?

No side projects at the moment — she’s focused on her new-ish position as a designer for Center City business analytics startup RJMetrics.

Along with RJMetrics design lead Zach Berman-Kozac, she works to make business analytics more accessible and easier to understand through design, but one of her other responsibilities is a little zanier: designing custom business cards for RJMetrics staffers, which sometimes feature personalized animal logos, like a hedgehog eating a bowl of ramen for RJMetrics developer Stephanie Liu.

(If you’re curious, RJMetrics CEO Robert Moore has a business card with a “laser shark” on it. That is, a shark with a laser on its head (a la Dr. Evil). When Hallden met Moore during her job interviews and saw that card, she said she knew she was in the right place.)