A new project aims to raise awareness of HIV by showing how the fast the virus could potentially spread through your social network. The project, condomlessandcounting.com, assigns each person their own link and asks them to send it to their connections. The links are tracked and once another person clicks on the link, they are “infected” with the virus.

We spoke with Natan Nikolic, who is behind the idea. His inspiration came from popular online viral games, in particular, vampire games.

“[The] Original concept of this pastiche was taken from popular online viral games with different narratives, most popular of them for instance with vampires where users get bitten and become vampires themselves when opening the URL.”

The project was designed for a creative brief for the Magdalena Festival under the sponsorship of CARS which is Slovenian organization for AIDS prevention.

We asked Nikolic if he planned on releasing the findings from the project, such as, the average number of people “infected” from each individual link and the number of people who took part in the project. Nikolic told us that he was optimistic about seeing interesting results from the project and if that was the case, he would be, “more than willing to share them with general public.”

So, not only do you get to help out a good cause, but the project might also help to further understanding into how information travels through social networks. As someone pointed out, think of it as rick-rolling for a good cause.

image credit: jared