The Monster Rebels

If you're sick of bending eBay to satiric or artistic ends, Friendster offers a new frontier. Writing in the SF Weekly, Lessley Anderson gives us a sample of what's been going on there lately:

Batty and numerous other Friendsters routinely violate the site's user agreement by creating fictional characters as profiles instead of, or in addition to, their "real" profiles. These "fakesters" portray themselves as everything from inanimate objects like the World Trade Center to celebrities like Paris Hilton to historical forces like War (which lists its profession as "resolving disputes")….

Though they are some of Friendster's most ardent fans -- many spend several hours a day on the site -- fakesters do everything they can to create anarchy in the system. They are not interested in finding friends through prosaic personal ads, but through a big, surreal party where Jesus, Chewbacca, and Nitrous are all on the guest list. To fakesters, phony identities don't destroy the social experience of Friendster; they enrich it.

The company doesn't care for such unauthorized uses of the system, but so far it's had a hard time squeezing the jinn back into the bottle.

Comments

[Lefty]

The signs of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls...

[s.m. koppelman]

The SF Weekly story dovetails nicely with this Village Voice item (scroll down a bit.) Some reasonably well-known club DJs and musicians have had their real profiles--complete with real photos--deleted because they were deemed fake by the squares running the site.

Friendster's Napsterlike name and logo are apt. Like Napster and so many dot-coms that came before it, Friendster seems to be built on an Underpants Gnome business model:

• Create an on-line free-for-all that succeeds because it's wide open with very low barriers to entry.
• ??????
• Profit!