New York: New York's Norman Perez gave his fingers the work of his life last week. Trying to establish a new Guinness world record for the longest time continuously typing, he ended up making a lot of friends online.

"The only thing I have to do is kind of focus. The hardest thing I'd probably say, is like talking to 20 different people at one time," says Perez.

A lot of the people that he was chatting with have been very friendly, with one woman even proposing marriage, but with the bouquets have come the brickbats.

"Marriage for one. Other ones are just plain not nice. There are people just saying 'I hope you lose', or 'I hope you don't fall asleep on the keyboard'. But there is a lot of encouragement though. That's kind of surprising to me. Coming into this, I thought people would say 'Oh yeah, this is kind of a waste of time'. But I got a lot of people helping me out," says he.

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Perez started typing continuously on a Monday, taking only five-minute breaks every hour. Five days later, he'd clocked up 96 hours at the computer - that's over 19 hours a day.

He's now awaiting a nod from the Guinness Book to crown him the world typing champion.

(With inputs by Renae Bunney from Reuters)