In the last 5 years we have seen an explosion of Social Networking and Micro Blogging sites. We utilize them to keep in touch with friends, family, colleagues, and the occasional random individual. People spend countless hours interacting with these sites, and what is very clear is, social networking in many ways is about the time invested. While these sites offer instant and almost addictive communication with large groups of people, there are some that miss the older forms of social interaction. In a world where a Flash animation, or a 140 character comment about a birthday, or other important event, there can be a certain lack of sincerity in the sentiment or the time it took to post it.

This is where the folks at the Package Project comes in. Package Projects goal is to build a physical network of interactions by sending creative, hand crafted, colorful packages to other bloggers around the world.

“The Package Project is an exchange aimed to connect bloggers around the world and to grow the blogging community even further. It is all about swapping pretty packages and handmade delights. The packaging only makes the exchange more fun so get creative…strings, manila tags and ribbons galore.”

If you participate in the Package Project you learn about your blogging partners through the creativity of the package they send. And the anticipation that is created through the process helps to build more meaningful interactions due to the time taken to hand craft your package.

Like online Social Networking the Package Project is also about the time invested, but unlike online Social Networking, the Package Project offers a slightly higher level of sincerity based on the time that is spent in creating something by hand. I find  the Package Project to be very interesting, and it makes me wonder if this marks a beginning to a possible Social Networking backlash. It’ll be interesting to see  what this leads to and how successful it ends up being.