Slashdot Mirror
Friendster Fights Fakesters
jerkface writes "Matchmaking/personal networking site Friendster is experiencing a 'problem'. Unruly individuals like John Locke, Socrates, Alf, and many incarnations of Jesus Christ are trying to take over the site, according to SFWeekly.com. For a few months, the 'fakesters' were mostly tolerated, so long as they didn't offend anyone with the images they posted. Fakester profiles exist claiming to be famous people (alive and dead), cities, buildings, abstract concepts, and - increasingly - Friendster CEO Jon Abrams. Abrams is now saying they're all going to be deleted because they ruin the site. Fakesters argue he's stifling the full potential of the site, and many people report that 100% genuine profiles have been deleted in the recent campaigns against fakesters."
Someone pretending to be someone they are not on the interweb????!!!! Say it ain't so!! This can't be true!!
This is slashdot. People here are not interested in dating because they met a beautiful +3 half-elf on everquest. Please move to the next story.
Sounds like the usual net tempest-in-a-toilet.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Surely Slashdot (karma whoring, karma whoring) has shown that a self-moderating system can tolerate huge amounts of noise and still turn up valuable content.
There are several rules that a site like Friendsters has to follow to allow value to emerge and be protected:
1. No democracy: status depends on time spent in the system and behaviour, and high status gives more power. (Basically like Karma).
2. Reputation: aliases, so if you troll, people know who you are.
3. Tools for promoting good and punishing bad behaviour (like moderation).
4. Design around the social aspects of the groups, i.e. if people want to use the system a certain way, let them.
The last is a bummer when people don't do what you expect them to. But if ten million fakesters create a happy community, why not?
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I'm sitting in a downtown San Francisco cafe with a man who won't tell me his name. Instead, he insists that I call him "Roy Batty" -- leader of the Nexus 6 replicants in Blade Runner. He says coyly that he's "in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic" and works as "a writer." Of what, he won't say.
Batty is a gaunt-looking man with serious gray-green eyes. He's probably in his early 30s. He's a coffeehouse philosopher who drops names like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and French avant-thinker Guy Debord the way some guys his age drop the names of indie rock bands. Batty doesn't want to give his real name because he believes that the concept of identity is quite elastic. Throughout history, he notes, human beings have loved to wear masks, adopting personas that were far different than their everyday ones. The malleable nature of selfhood is why he's so intrigued by Blade Runner, which, he says, he's seen more than 100 times. The Batty replicant isn't quite human, but is so close that it causes the viewer to question what it means to be truly human. Similarly, the Batty I'm drinking coffee with struggles with what it means to be "really yourself." Who you are, he says, can change from moment to moment.
"Identity is provisional," Batty insists. "It's fluid."
I met Roy Batty on Friendster.com, the popular matchmaking Web site that's quickly become a social phenomenon among even people who aren't single. Friendster introduces you to the friends of your friends through a big interconnected database. You register for the free site, create a personal profile with pictures and descriptions of yourself, and invite your friends to do the same. Your page is linked to their pages, and their pages are linked to their friends' pages, and so on. When you look at other people's profiles, you can see how you are connected through mutual friends. Suddenly at your fingertips is an ocean of potential friends, lovers, and networking opportunities.
That was the plan, at least.
The site has attracted legions of young creative types: DJs, artists, media people, Burning Man freaks, and other hipsters -- particularly in tech-savvy San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Not surprisingly, many of them went to great lengths to make their profiles unusual, or above-it-all and drenched in irony. Some, like Batty, took it a step further by not being themselves at all.
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").
Emboldened by their masks and often preferring the weird over the normal, fakesters are turning Friendster on its ear. They link to other users they've never met in real life, flouting the site's original intent of connecting people through verifiable personal relationships. Many compete to link to as many other users as possible, so that their fictional characters function as social hubs in the Friendster network.
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.
But fakesters aren't hosting this gig. Jonathan Abrams, the 33-year-old software engineer who founded Friendster to improve his own social life, is -- and he abhors the phony profiles. He believes they diminish his site's worth as a networking tool and claims that fakesters' pictures -- often images ripped off the Web -- violate trademark law. Abrams' 10-person Sunnyvale company has begun rut
c'mon! it's the web! pretending to be someone else while flirting with the ladies is half the fun.
no wait, i guess that's all the fun.
The next person that puts a product with a stolen naming gimmik is getting an iBullet in the Headster
According to Passport .Net, my name is Mickey Mouse101, and I live in Disneyland. Am I a lovable cuddly creature, or a detestable, copyright-extended, DRMed pesky little mouse?
Lindows distributes Linux, but sponsors an XBox hack, and pays license fees to SCO. Friend or freak?
Confusing, consufing...
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Hmmm...false profiles on the internet? Didn't see this coming...
It's 2003. Is there really no reliable way to electronically identify oneself, so that you can prove you are a person with the name and age given?
It would make sense for passports (as in the funny booklet thing you have to take with you when travelling, for some obscure reason) to include your PGP public key. Then the passport itself (or at least the machine-readable section at the back) can be PGP signed by the government. That way you are able to prove who you are. Messages sent from Friendster or other sites would be encrypted using your public key.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If your /. account were to be closed you'd either re-subscribe or move on to a different site. Right?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Who wants to be my friend? I would even accept, if would like to be my foe, but someone, please pay attention to me. Buhuhuhu!
Friendster is in beta right now, and in several months anyone wishing to browse profiles or send messages will have to pay $8 a month. It will still be free to make a profile for others to browse. The fee is why I'm not taking the site seriously. Friendster will end up just another dating site. I expect free open source versions to appear in its place though that could be worthwhile if they reach a level of popularity similar to Kazaa.
There's a feature on the same topic at salon
generic
I am not really an 18 year old cheerleader desperate for sex, especially with older men and particularly when my girlfriends can join in.
I am in fact a brussel sprout with time traveling capabilities.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
They are planning to do so anyway, the fakesters disruptions just give them a good reason to do so.
Granted, it won't eliminate the fakers, but at least they will be paying for the privilege.
Friendster is a really good idea. When a friend of mine sent me the link I thought it was another one of those dating sites. But it's really cool b/c you get to see who the friends of your friends are :)
Sure not everyone posts their real name etc, but who cares? Since it's amoung friends then we all know who it is. I guess the problem is if someone joins randomly and starts to "make" friends then yeah we have problems there.
But as always, there will be some sick bastards who try to screw up the system.
when you have real dolls http://www.realdoll.com/intro.asp
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Okay, I'm just pissed I didn't think of it first.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Most of them are just ways for creeps to harvest your email address for PrOn SPAM emails. I have even been told by a local strip club owner (work with his Mac and sound system) that his girls get on match.com and entice guys to come in all the time; that it's a requirement of the job.
I wish Yahoo and Match would police their ads better - sometime there's such a thorough or a good writer that it's hard to know whether or not they are a real person or not. Usually you can tell by the picture; model poses.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Before that happened, someone tried to post a picture of a Cardassian from Star Trek. Turned out the guy was an extra on Deep Space 9, but they still wouldn't let him post the picture in his profile.
The point being, there always has to be some regulation at a site like Friendster, otherwise it can't be used for its original purpose. I'm not going to waste time trying to track down old friends or expand my circle of friends just to get an email saying "The Brooklyn Bridge wants to meet you".
It might take a bit more time but implementing a the principle of slash dot might do the trick
Dont just mail it - Maileet
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what protection is there to stop some fat 40yr old american sicko from pretending he is a 12yr old kid
Mr Batty's account is not being deleted. It is merely being retired.
Who cares about "fake" members? Friendster, probably. And some journalist who can't find a better story. Yahoo and others don't seem to. This is just what Friendster wants and needs: media coverage to get new members. Hopefully more "real" members and not as many "fakes".
Indeed. Kinda my point exactly: if you don't accomodate people's preferred social models, they will go somewhere else.
I'm not debating the rights and wrongs, only the 'how'. I presume the idea of deleting fake profiles is to keep the system working. I believe it will instead break it. Look at the scene in 3 months' time and you will see that the interesting people have gone elsewhere, and built a better site that does what they want.
The problem is basically that even a good designer cannot predict what such systems will do, or even define what "works" formally. You can only create tools that allow the people who spend most time in the group to promote value and punish fools, and then let things progress as they will.
Personally I would make it possible for high ranking profiles to demote abusers of the system. However, many of the fakesters are very intense users, highly dedicated, and responsible for much of the growth of the network. Why on earth would you want to stop them doing their thing? It's foolish and short-sighted.
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Just keep your fluids to yourself perv.
I guess on Friendster, that would give a whole new meaning to the word "karma whoring".
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
I have a certificate that I use when filing taxes online and doing other business with the government. Don't know if it will be possible for private websites to use the certificate - haven't looked that much into it. Does anyone know? But it works - and is compatible with both Mozilla (+Netscape) and IE ... dunno about other browsers.
Someone should make a peer to peer chat program where you link up in the same manner as on friendster.
what sig?
you need an editor.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
"Sir, are you classified as human."
"Uh, negative. I am a meat popsicle."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I don't need to fake my identity, because, I'm an 19 year old hot girl and I only have fun when we are three people.
Have I mentioned, that I have I private web-site (www.xxx.com/anita), just because I like to undress myself and have fun
Uuuuuuh, call me now, private and discreet (2$/min)
"Single white male, late 30's. Flexible posterior, looking for same. See www.goatse.cx for picture."
Trolling is a art,
But I realy am god!
But outside of that, I think he is right to setup the rules for his site and operate his site the way that he wants to.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
A shot on the hood of a pinto, or a beehive haircut are a pretty good indicator of an old photo too...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Is that you?
Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On A Technicality --theonion.com
Geek discussion site seeks similar for karma wh0ring and meaningful flaming. Interests include Linux, not paying for stuff, and sticking one over on The Man. Dislikes include Microsoft, the RIAA and SCO. Please include a recent screenshot in your reply. All respondents must be compatible with Mozilla 1.4.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
My point was perhaps more subtle.
When you create an infrastructure for people to communicate with, you must make a basic choice: are you the publisher, or only the provider? It's a common dilema: when the provider turns into a publisher, even briefly, there are all kinds of problems.
If you start deleting profiles, does this mean you take responsibility for the quality of profiles? The answer is "yes", and that simply switch of position, from provider of communication services to quality assurer changes the model.
If you start deleting profiles, does this mean you assert control over what people can do? Yes, and worse, you have changed the consitution of the network to add the "dictator" function. People stop trusting you at that point.
If you start deleting profiles, are you censoring the discussion? Yes, because censorship is simply the point at which the governing authority switches from acting neutrally to enable communications to acting in a partisan manner, approving some communications over others.
When a government tells a newspaper what it can or cannot print, that is censorship. Why? Because the role of government is to create frameworks in which people can communicate (and do everything else) freely within a well-defined consitution.
It's no different here.
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It is very different here.
A newspaper certainly has the right to choose which letters to the editor it publishes, which ads it accepts, which editorials and stories it publishes, and what it lets you say in the classifieds. This is not censorship.
If the govt makes those decisions for the newspaper (and presumably all newspapers) that IS censorship.
But if its the newspaper itself that is stopping the article from being published, tough shit. Go start your own newspaper.
So what's the difference between friendster "fakesters" and real life fakesters? Think about it. In a bar there are always a few guys in there who are working it hard to be someone they're not, sometimes not even using their real names, they're often the ones surrounded by the simple-minded blondes who are attracted to their feaux persona. Same goes for friendster. Moving on, imagine if someone walked into a bar wearing a giant Oscar Meyer Weiner costume, immediately he would become the topic of conversation and a good number of people would approach him and become his "friend". This is the same thing that happens on friendster.
So maybe this phenomenon is a little more rampant because the anonymity of the internet allows people to drop a few inhibitions, but the concept is the same. Randomly deleting fakesters is a bad idea. The concept of charging for the service seems to be somewhat of a better idea. I know most of the /.ers will complain "it should be free" yadda yadda yadda, heard it all before. It would be nice if it were free, but I'm sure the folks who work for friendster would like a paycheck. Now, $8 a month seems a little high for friendster, if it were like $2, or even $5 I might consider paying for the service. Regardless, $8 a month is pretty good way to ensure the friendsters and fakesters who really serve some sort of purpose.
And just to piss of the Friendster folks...http://www.friendster.com/user.jsp?id=2339 91 last name, McGuire :).
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
As a result, the online dating revenue model will shift from subscriptions to advertising.
So you are right to be pessimistic about subscription-based Friendster...
Of course, Friendster could always embrace Go_Ogle, via 'Powered by Go_Ogle' search, in which case Friendster would keep 80% of the ad revenue, and likely eliminate the need to charge a subscription fee...
More here
Isn't Yahooligans the name of Yahoo's kids' website?
Sheesh.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Friendster has too many damn yuppies (I refuse to call them "hipsters") to be worth much anyway. I haven't seen so much faux-drama and Prada since the last time I was in Manhattan.
First if you're not supporting the stated aim of the service (you can't date a city or a dead person,) you're history.
Second if you insist on attempting to twist the service into something its not, why don't you spend the fifty bucks to buy a url, start your own site and stop defacing somebody else's.
Third people who try to force themselves on others are often called rapists and its against the law. I'm sure some deprivation of civil rights lawsuit could be brought to bear.
Come to think of it I'd like to start a class action suit against people who pay people to send me spam. Nip the problem in the bud with an expensive law suit for whoever is the idiot who's filling my mail box with a Niagara of Viagara.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
it could even be taken farther: have the software keep track of how many people have rejected your link. if it's more than 10, that's a pretty good bet that you're a fakester that can be modded down. or maybe you're just an asshole that no one likes, which is still a good reason to be modded to oblivion.
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three o'clock... with nail polish."
The 14th Amendment, and its jurisprudence, requires the States to abide by the First Amendment as well. This is good. You live in a republic, not a collection of co-equal states.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Is there really no reliable way to electronically identify oneself, so that you can prove you are a person with the name and age given?
Well, there is real-time audio and video. It's difficult (but not impossible) to disguise your voice effectively to impersonate the opposite gender; it's even harder to impersonate the face of a different human being, male or female.
Cumbersome, but I can imagine the value of a chatroom or dating site that ONLY allows users with video chat capabilities to make use of its database -- individuals could enter their profile with photos or short audio or video clips, begin communicating by voice, and then move to video to be sure of who they're talking to before trying anything IRL.
Not foolproof, of course -- no system is. But it's a good way to allow a certain amount of anonymity while ensuring a useful level of honesty.
These guys/gals should get off their arses and goto a club.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
i've seen some fakesters that were genuinely amusing and entertaining. on a large scale however, they really do fsck up the system.
...
i'm not saying we should be able to count on the absolute validity of the 'relationships' represented on the site, but SOME kind reality makes it a whole lot more useful and fun... and they're kind of hurting their friends who are really trying to use the site by diluting and obfuscating the branching nature of the database.
i like friendster. and i would hate to see it turn into a worthless connection of inside jokes and half-baked platitudes and simple-minded social consciences.
and if some real profiles are being deleted by mistake, then be pissed at the fakesters who made it happen, not the people trying to provide a meaningful experience that lives up to how it is being advertised
Yes, it's a good movie and all that.
But anyone that sees a movie that many times makes me kind of nervous.
I definitely wouldn't invite such a person out to go shoot handguns or anything.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yes, of course they can do what they like.
I'm only pointing out that if they want their network to be popular (I presume this is the idea) then they have to work with, not against, the way people want to use it.
It's not a matter of legality or illegality. It's a matter of how to run a network that people use and enjoy using and bring their friends onto. Censorship, when you tell people what they can and cannot say in a supposedly free forum, is simply not a good tool.
It will, as I originally said, go sour.
The correct way to filter noise is to give the group the tools to do it. Then you get a self-adjusting space in which those people who invest time in creating content get some say over its well-being.
Look: it's very interesting to see fakesters acting as 'hubs', for instance. It's an impossible thing if you insist that only real profiles exist, yet hubs are incredibly useful to the network.
Of course I totally support the right of Friendster to shoot themselves in the foot, it's fine by me: the result will be the creation of multiple other sites that do the same, for free, and following a constitution that I'd consider "healthy".
I'm not interested in judging Friendster's actions as 'legal' or not, I don't give a toss. But I find it very interesting indeed to try to understand what makes this kind of network work or fail.
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Now, the fakesters are whatever-
The thing that I do like about friendster is the people that have set up "hubs". For example, someone created a profile for my college (Bennington), and increasingly, people from my school become friends with that profile. It's a great way to reconnect, since it creates a common hub for people.
I've also seen nodes for other schools, religions, countries and whatnot.
Those should be allowed to stay- or, integrate the idea into the system a little bit more.
I dunno - got Blade Runner DVD on a shelf and I'm sure I've seen it like hundreds of times too. Only watched it maybe three or four times, but seen it every time I walk by. Maybe the guy is just an off-duty lawyer who likes making people nervous.
Actually, suddenly, I agree with you. I definitely would not date an off-duty lawyer.
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Just like the Internet, the Free & Open Source Software community, Slashdot, Sharereactor or your average MMOG.
And like in any social network, you have the "mainstream" and the "fringe" folks.
Call them "Fakesters", "Trolls", "Leeches", "Role Players" or "PKers", the "fringe" always has a different set of values and beliefs (v&bs). Which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing as they can often be very entertaining/interesting/though provoking.
However problems may arise when the v&bs of the fringe come in direct conflict with the v&bs of the community at large while, at the same time, the "mainstream" doesn't have the means to isolate itself from the behavior of the "fringe".
Friendster-the-company should have designed a way for the "Friendsters" to isolate the behavior of "Fakesters" without having to delete them. Something like the moderation system on slashdot. Maybe it's still possible to modify the social rules of this particular network and maybe it's too late and any deep change would kill it.
In any case, what this story illustrates once again is that designing software for social networks is hard.
As hard as dealing with humans can be...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
There's no reason this isn't equivalent to spamming Friendster. What's going to stop "Viagra" or "UltraMegaPenis supplements" from joining up and making 'friends'?
When you create an infrastructure for people to communicate with, you must make a basic choice: are you the publisher, or only the provider?
Scenario:
I decide to start my own club, and I decide it will be a, say, fantasy football club, and that the only people allowed in will be those with an interest in fantasy football, and that most discussion *during the club meetings* will be about fantasy football.
Given the above scenario, I've created a private infrastrucure for communication, dedicated to one thing: fantasy football. Now, someone says they want to join, and says that they like fantasy football and wish to discuss it, but then come meeting time they show up dressed in a multi-colored jumpsuit with one of those stupid jester hats on, and only want to sing '60s folk tunes. If I kick this person out of my club, am I censoring them? Hell no. They can go somewhere else and sing whatever they want. I'm not denying them the *right* to say whatever they want, I'm just protecting my club member's right to do what they signed up for in the first place. That's not censorship. Now, if the government created a webforum for all US citizens to use however they wanted (ostensibly) and then they started deleting profiles they didn't like, *that* would be censorship. However, if the government started a web forum for discussion of tax policies, and they deleted all profiles that did not discuss tax policies, that would NOT be censorship. If a system is designed for a certain use, and people are not using it for that, the creator of the system can remove them. That isn't censorship. It says before you join up what the site is for. If you don't want to use it for that, go somewhere else. There is no 'well-defined constitution' on friendster.com that says you can be anyone other than yourself, or that you can post fake pictures/profiles. Your example and reasoning are both flawed.
http://xkcd.com/386/
One of the biggest problems with this arbitrary deleting of accounts is that they are also deleting the accounts which represent groups/institutions people may belong to. For example, I added a "friend" which represented the college I attend, and it had been deleted recently due to this cleanup. I have met several people from my own school whom I would otherwise not have known existed due to this connection, and that account was deleted because it did not represent a real-live human being. My friend was also pissed off because by "friending" an account named after a celebrity, she was able to connect with many other fans of that celebrity, yet now that account may soon be deleted as well because it is "fake". Since friendster advertises itself as a system to connect to people of similar interests (as opposed to a dating service), it should continue to allow such accounts
meanwhile, since it will soon charge, my friends and I are switching over to Ringo, another similar free service which seems to be the most popular alternative.
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
When a government tells a newspaper what it can or cannot print, that is censorship.
Are libel laws censorship? The government (or the courts) does control what a newspaper can print to some extent. Removing things which are factually incorrect isn't necessarily the same thing as removing things that one disagrees with.
What's the deal with the angst over the word "censorship?" I'm not implying anything immoral, just commenting on the technique. This is the definition of the word "censor" from dictionary.com:
"A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable."
And I believe that's exactly what's happening here.
Indeed there are many forms of healthy censorship, a good example being one where a group censors itself.
Slashdot moderation is a form of censorship, but it works. Why? Because the decision of "good" versus "evil" is done by the group, and following the dynamics of the group.
Why should this matter? For two reasons. First, a single person cannot accurately measure the opinions of the group. Secondly, because individuals don't often change their opinions, while groups do.
I'm all in favour of censorship, if done correctly. What this means is providing the group with the tools to do it, not applying it from the top down.
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Read this article here titled "Why Digital Signatures Are Not Signatures." As demonstrated in the article, there really is no fool-proof way to connect a person's online identity to their real-world identity.
Cryptogram
A real world example -- 10 years in the future and the developed countries and businesses of the world have agreed to use some kind of digital "signature" to authenticate people. Technogeek Bob wants a fake online identity. He breaks into Joe Sixpack's unpatched computer, and finds the private key. He then installs a keystroke logger and waits a few weeks. Joe unwittingly uses his key to "sign" his latest phone bill payment, and voila, Bob has his identity. As long as he doesn't do anything outrageous with it, it's unlikely he will be caught. Or an even worse scenario -- someone leaks the government's key to the public or is bribed/coerced into "signing" fake certificates, and then all such "signatures" become meaningless and we are back where we started -- here. Like everything else security wise, the technology isn't the weakest link -- the people are.
Now that's not to say that this level of security isn't good enough for friendster. But because this type of attack is possible, it's doubtful that digital "signatures" will ever reach widespread usage for anything economically or legally important. And as such, it will be unlikely that businesses or governments will ever bother to use them in such a major way.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
So will we find Gender Bender in there?
You know, he's a real tuffie!
I hope people do the same thing to other online communities, gubernatorial elections, etc.
You seem to be under the impression that censorship is illegal. Well it ain't, dumass. Censorship goes on EVERYWHERE and it's completely LEGAL. When the govt starts doing it it becomes a problem. Go back to Law 101.
if i'm paying $10 a month, you can be damn sure i'd rather be Jesus than me
Jon Abrams: "Oh, I get it. Your friends are all smartass types."
It's like if Theo De Raadt started a dating service.
Wait - this guy is from Canada....
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
yes, yes! or a freakin mullet!
oh wait, they still have those in the southern states, don't they? disregard..
You mean there's still one place on the net where they haven't figured out how to tie all your demographics together??? They should fire their marketing team!!!!
Used to be, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Now, not only do they know you're a dog, but what kind of dog food you eat, and what kind of dog porn you like (french poodles?)*.
* Except on Friendster, apparently.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Well put.
If you are being annoyed by a gang of 12 year old's damaging your
.... really .....really.....slooooow ... for
fence and being a nuisance then asking them to stop, chasing them
around and trying to take away their football with not do you any
good. They will get back at you by acting like kids and setting
your fence on fire. You have no real power over them.
Abram's is dealing with bunch of people with a mental age of 12.
Abrams would be better off taking a more subtle approach.
Make the site go
fakers. Set up fakefriends.com (fakester.com is taken) and
transfer faker accounts to a seperate system.
He could even take the radical approach of allowing fakers,
provided they are marked as such. Have part of the
signup be the questions "Are the details you have entered true?"
and "is this a real picture of you?". Give people the option
of removing all fakers from thier view of friendster.
"Look at the scene in 3 months' time and you will see that the interesting people have gone elsewhere"
No, interesting people don't need to use the internet meet other people for friendship/romance/networking.
I have thought this since I first signed up on the site. A user should have a little more control over their "friend network". It would be nice to have the ability to set the "degrees" of separation yourself (with a site max of course). Also, after using the site for a while, I realize it would also be nice to have exclusions, such that if a connection has to route through someone I've excluded from my network then either another path must be found, or that connection is not made.
Not sure how that would work with the algorithms though. It could be kind of difficult to include those exclusions and keep performance (not that the site performs well now).
I think it would also create interesting "subnetworks". I'm guessing that the fakesters would end up being in isolated networks, while people interested in using the site for the "proper" purposes (defined by the site policies) would be far less affected.
Hmmm. They need more user controls!
-Alex
Aimee Plumley does, but only with the proper level of contempt.
Conspir8or
For the past year I have roboted a particular online matchmaking service each day. I began doing this after I noticed a huge influx of fake profiles in my geographic area and found the site unwilling to do anything about it.
My scripts collect stats on the number of profiles in each state, etc. The trends, as revealed by graphs, are disturbing.
At times, this site has restored inactive profiles that are many years old to service. This gives the impression that there are more members and helps boost new subscriptions.
Other times, huge numbers of fake profiles were newly created. Many of the fake profiles in question are pay, not free, accounts. That suggests that the management of the site is actually behind the activity (it is highly unlikely anyone is going to spend that much ($40 minimum for each profile). This, combined with specific claims on the number of active members, could be considered criminal fraud.
Unfortunately, most of these pay sites hide the age or activity level of a profile. They don't provide good ways to ignore profiles that have been inactive for months or years.. Heck, many of the 'supported' search features don't work reliably on this site...
Obviously, the goal is making money.
http://www.everyonesconnected.com
I'm not sure about the purpose of friendster (heard it was to sell emails of people who signed up), so I moved on to Everyone's Connected. Better set up anyways.
worth a look and if friendster is REALLY giving you problems, here is an alternative
Now Michael Bolton will never get a date!!!
I decided to log back on to friendster, check out what's going on.
My funny photos (all mine, taken by me, except one, which happens to be a photo of a chip bag) are all unapproved.
Well, FYVM Friendster. I'll not be logging back in there if you can't handle a picture of a can of food & a chip bag. Good God, even when I was in high school I could "express myself" more than that. Yikes! What's next? Approved names?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
heh, forget about the 'model poses', just remove all the accounts where the user's cool links are just a bunch of links to a webcam website ... the yahoo chat service is full of bots and they all have profiles linking to the same couple websits, all yahoo needs to do is query the database against those couple of urls and delete all the accounts and foom thousands and thousands and thousands of fake accounts are gone in a heartbeat...
Friendster is supposed to be a trust network, where people met via other people are supposed to be somewhat trusted. The fake items ruin that trust network.
Here's an example, the "City of Pittsburgh" item. So you grew up in Pittsburgh, and someone else went to school there. Does that mean that people could be trusted that came out the other side of that relationship? Hell no. And Pittsburgh has **196** friends listed as of now.. chances are its in your network somewhere.
http://www.friendster.com/user.jsp?id=1174924
Also.. whats up with the maximum four levels deep you can access? I would think that the depth of the graph to traverse would be configurable per user. I mean, I can't even get to Kevin Bacon.. and there's like 30 accounts with his name.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
About time. Fauxsters, and the people who link with them, have seriously diluted the usefulness of Frienster as a social device.
If I see an interesting profile of someone who knows a friend of mine, that's a legitimate social connection. But if the chain of relationships goes through "Mr. T", "New York City", and "Sex", it means nothing.
I do worry that actual celebrities might get incorrectly labeled as fake and have their accounts deleted. I've come across a few minor celebrities in my network (the Snickers voiceover guy, the Pets.com sockpuppet) and although mutual acquaintances have confirmed to me that they are who they are, it would be easy for a Friendster Cleanup Agent to assume it was fraudulent.
And anyone who thinks nobody needs to be anonymous has never been stalked.
I even know some people who have managed to inspire obsession without ever displaying a photo, not even of their cat.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
One of the funny things about Friendsters trying to recreate a natural society... society is almost driven by the arms race between the fakers and the cheat-detectors. We are constantly trying to fake each other, and constantly spotting and defeating these fakes.
At least, this is the theory used by social scientists to explain emotions, and I tend to agree. Emotions evolved to be unfakable demonstrations of sincerity, which is why we're so impressed by good actors.
So the problems that Friendster is having with fakesters is actually a very good mirror of real society, except that Friendster lacks the tools for detecting and punishing cheats!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
It's their site, they can run it however they want. In fact if they are advertising that you can meet "real" people on their site, then it's sort of their responsibility to purge fake profiles.
There are plenty of places to go on the net to pretend to be someone you are not, so any censorship argument just doesn't hold water.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Fakesters argue the full potential of the site is being stifled?
How, exactly, does a profile for Princess Diana enhance Friendster's potential?
personal site: journal.amanita.net
lesbian se
There are some reasons why fakesters can form legimate communities within friendster.
One example is dog owners. A good friend of mine has a dog and created a profile for him. If any of you know the San Francisco dog park culture, people are not known by their names, they are known as the parents of "Skippy", "Macho", or "Rufus". Since their social network is built directly around their pets, why not allow that network to flourish.
Another example is really a hack since Friendster does not support true groups. I have a dj friend that wanted to promote his shows. He created an alias for his dj collective and invited the regulars to be the collective's friend. Now through the messaging, he can easily promote his parties. You could argue "Well, why not use yahoogroups or some other listserv?" Well the benefit is that Friendster still maintains the relative anonymity of the users (no email address revealed). Now maybe if friendster supported this functionality it would work.
I personally feel that Fakesters add something to the culture. I love getting messages from Conan the Barbarian (especially with the recent events in California) or Barbara Bush. If they wanted to police this, they should have done this from the beginning, instead of trying to take it away once its been established. They will probably loose a lot of members.
Damn - this is so important. I'm glad Slashdot keeps us up to date about things like this. Don't think I could have made it through the day without this information...
A friend of mine sent me an invite to join Friendster a month or two ago, and I played around with it. I'm not sure how many people here know what the service is supposed to be (pardon if you do, but I had no idea until I was invited to sign up), because it seems that the whole premise of Friendster is to develop contact with people through association of mutual friends.
Now, if I know somebody named Lester (which I do), he invites me, and I decide to sign up on Friendster as "Elvis Presley", who the hell cares what identity I claim? By association, I will gain contact with Lester and all of his friends (whether I know them or not), and if I pursue contact with any of these people then what does it matter if I say my name is Jim or Elvis? Whether it's a relationship that never moves beyond electronic contact (IM, email), or if I actually go spend physical time with some of Lester's friends, isn't the end result still the same? Didn't I make contact with people that I previously didn't know? What's more, I think that part of presenting one's self online involves representing your sense of humor, and what better way than to claim that you're The King?
We're not talking about people spamming the service with junk, or abusing user's rights; we're talking about pretending to be somebody else while online, which is certainly nothing new. I think that deleting such users is kinda silly, and it would be downright annoying if they have in fact deleted even one legitimate user as a result. If this approach were taken with other electronic realms, everything would eventually be shut down because "fakesters" would ruin it for everyone.
Bye bye Cocaine... I hardly new ye...
(Cocaine was everyone's friend.)
Please look up the George W. Bush entry.
Fave Book: "The only book ive ever had read to me was the bible."
Fave Music: "Anything by Francis Scott Key."
Couple this with entries for "The Dude" from big lebowski, the aforementioned "War" and you have further insight into what these peoples interests are like. I know my sister made George W. her friend after reading the disparaging profile. I think the creator should limit deleting accounts to profane ("A Big Penis") accounts and is really selling himself short. The entropy of interacting people is bound to create unexpected results, however they are not always "bad."
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I have to agree with heironymous here. I think whether we call it censorship or editorial control is just semantics, albeit censorship is a loaded term.
While Friendster has the right to edit/censor the accounts that exist there, is it wise for them to do so?
I would be inclined to make friends with fakesters for the meta-effects. I would associate with the fake personalities about issues that I am interested in, and these choices would reflect my opinions on the world creating all kinds of network effects. This is the whole point of the site (as noted in the article and by other slashdotters).
I think with a self moderation system the s/n ratio would be manageable, and all parties would get the site that they are looking for. It just seems counter productive to alienate a sector of your userbase (I haven't seen any percentages listed) when you are forming a community.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
I honestly don't see why they mind. Joke accounts don't "ruin" the site at all. People who befriend "Frodo Baggins" obviously don't think they are going to score a date with the real Frodo (who left for the Undying Lands Ages ago)...what they do think is that they might be able to meet people with similar interests (singing, travelling, ring-bearing). Which is exactly what the site is for. Calling them "fake" is pretty ingenuous, since they only exist to connect and amuse people, not to fool them.
The other possible objection is that the joke accounts connect people directly who don't know each other in real life, which already happens with real accounts. Lots of times, you message someone in your network and end up befriending them without ever meeting them in meatspace. It's not an abuse of the site as much as a use unforeseen by the designers, and joke accounts are only a tiny part of the "problem."
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
I had to send an email into feedbad@freindster.com to find it, but here is the link to quit: http://www.friendster.com/cancelaccount.jsp
I actually found some of those 'fakesters' on friendster.com, and I thought they were hilarious. One of the fakesters "giant squid" had a big rant about the CEO being a Nazi, deleting 'fakesters' so I figured there was some sort of battle being waged.
I understand the impetus for deleting these fakesters, for one lots of people want to add the funny ones to their list which creates lots of connections that shouldn't really exist. But it seems kind of harsh. A better solution would be to 'limit' fakesters in such a way that two people who would only have connections through a fakester would not be 'connected'. That way the general concept of the site would not be ruined.
Besides, why shouldn't people be able to be friends with someone like "x-ray hello kitty" or whatever?
I think its to bad. Friendster is actually pretty interesting and I think those 'fakesters' add to the site. Any time you try to 'clamp down' and act all authoritarian it ruins a lot of the fun. Ideal solutions allow people to have fun while shielding people who aren't interested in 'fun' from them... kind of like Slashdot's moderation system.
What Friendster should do is have some sort of mod system like on hotornot, and allow people to opt out of seeing 'fakesters'.
I mean, what this basically amounts to is a corporation telling you who can and cannot be your friend (basically saying that you can't be friends with someone who uses and anon identity and non-photographic image.)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Does anyone who uses the service know if it has
international coverage, or is it another USA
only thing (google for frienster+europe returns 1
non-relevant hit)?
I think you used the word entropy way wrong. How does 'people interacting' create more microstates that have the same microstate?
I think the word you are looking for is chaos, or maybe you should have just said "large numbers of people interacting will cause unexpected results"
Entropy is the number if microstates, the individual kinetic energy of each particle) that have the same 'macrostate', like the heat.
For example a block of ice has lower entropy then a glass of water because in the ice the water molecules can only move around a little bit, while in the water they can move all over the place, and have many more possible amounts of kinetic energy.
The 'entropy' in Friendster would be the connections that could be severed without changing the over-all macrostate of the site. So if bob is connected to everyone that Jane is connected to, and he deletes Jane, it doesn't affect anyone else on the site. These fakesters actually do add entropy because lots of people connect to them. In some cases you could drop a whole group of them without changing the over all state for anyone else.
(anyway, please let me know if I made any mistakes in my explanation of entropy)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Nothing exemplifies our late-capitalist / post-modern era like the Fakesters on Friendster. People, concepts, objects and everything reduced to images placed side-by-side. The images mean nothing in the larger context in relation to eachother, but Friendster automatically "transcodes" them for you, in a way, by showing how they are connected in their "personal networks".
Friendster may be the emancipative look-in-the-mirror we need to function as the seeds of the next stage in the dialectic.
I'm really surprised nobody has mentioned this before.
If I ban your book in my house, is that censorship? You would say no? But what if I owned an sovereign island nation? Would that be censorship? What if I raised an army on my island and took over the US and banned your book here? You could always just leave. It wouldn't be congress doing the censoring because they would all be in jail.
Anytime someone's voice is silenced, it's censorship. In particular, it's censorship within a community. If I remove Graffiti from my house is it is censorship, but most people would say that having a clean house is more important then the expression of vandals on property they don't own (or in other words, private property laws are more important then freedom of speech)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
When you see an add that has a glossy shot scanned from a porno mag about someone who can't wait to have sex with you, it is a fake and you should stay away.
There is a balance of how much spam you get and how much you have to pay. I tried using yahoo personals, excite personals, and few other free sites and it was all porn scam profiles. Moving up to pay services like matchmaker.com and match.com, I managed to see a lot of real ads (match had poor search capabilies and kept setting me up with people half way accross the US), matchmaker worked great, there are other good dating services that are specific to the locale (on the east coast match.com is better than matchmaker, on west coast it is the other way, ymmv).
Now the point of this story is that if it costs money to use a service, most spammers and scammers will stay away, as the costs to create many anon fake accounts becomes way to high to justify the results. So when a service like that charges for its use, then it will attract legitimate people serious about what the service is willing to provide, if the service is free there will be thousands of people there looking for a way to make a quick buck, harvest emails, start scams or promote products you do not need.
I will say that I've seen very funny, very entertaining fake profiles. Like Christopher Walken. And he's got like 400 friends. That profile probably serves to connect people who otherwise never would be ...
and that's good AND bad. For the purposes of Friendster, for it to be what its creators and a lot of its users WANT it to be, these fakesters really do fsck up the system. There's no real chain of communication. You can't go to your friend's friend and say "What an ass!" or "Damn s/he is awesome!" cuz there's no real logical connection if it is thru one of these fake profiles.
I think the fakesters are abusing the system and watering down the experience and intent. I also think that they are obfuscating a very neat idea of building a semi-accountable community of people that can really trace thru who they know all these myriad individuals around the world.
The Fakesters may add flair, but ultimately they dilute any value it has.
Now, do I support deleting these Fakesters? No - but there must be a way to cap the account in some way, i.e. make it impossible for someone to add friends with or to these fake accounts. This would solve the problem of bad relationship data while at the same time not putting valid profiles at risk.
But y'know, in the long run, its their site, their bandwidth, their service - they can delete who they want, and if your actual profile gets deleted by accident, then be pissed at the fakesters who created the situation in the first place.
Just my 2
Yeah, they own the domain name and the servers and the code, but other then the code (which would probably not be that hard to re-implement) the value of the site is not created by them. It's created by the users. If the users get bored or pissed off at the people who control things. Just look at Slashdot. I think a lot of people don't really like the people who run this site because they take all of our value (submissions and comments) profit off of it, and never seem the least bit grateful.
Who knows if this fakester deletion spree would be more or less annoying then all the lameness filters and two-minute waiting limits we have to deal with here? Maybe it'll be a lot more annoying to Friendster users.
If interesting people stop using Friendster, Friendster will get a lot less interesting. People might move to another service or just give up on the site.
can do whatever they like. That doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In the UK there is a similar site at EveryonesConnected.
It claims to have 50,000 members, but when I signed up this week, my ID was ~30,000, so I expect that this is a little exaggerated. It appears that relatively few active members, because when I had a look round, the same faces popped up again and again.
They require you to sign up two of your friends before you have full access (to peoples profiles etc.) I guess this provides some peer pressure to be honest about yourself.
There is also a business networking site here, which is mostly poplulated by people in North America at the moment.
When a newspaper declines an advertisement, it is censorship. It's not illegal, but it is censorship.
Maybe it is on a theoretical level too when they decline letters, but no one would expect them to publish every letter. On the net, though, you can.
Non-government censorship isn't 'evil' sometimes it's necessary. The question is when it is good, and when is it bad?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The definition of 'censorship' does not have the word 'government' in it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is a little more like if I were to bring a group together to paint posters, and having a good portion of the group decide it would be more fun to use the paper to make paper airplanes.
No, it's more like this. You have a group thousands of people together to paint portraits of themselves and get to know each other -- sort of a hippy type 'themed' party. Some of the people decide to start painting portraits of other things. Like Abe Lincoln and what Hello Kitty might look like if she was X-rayed. And then you Took those people, burned their paintings and threw them out
Could you do it? I guess. Would you or anyone else have much fun after that?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you don't like someone, killfile them. They already have enough CPU power to calculate everyone's 'links' in somewhat real-time. Adding kill files wouldn't be too much more work.
Let people decide for themselves who they want to be 'protected from' and more importantly, who they don't.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"People say they can't get enough of it -- even though Friendster's servers are so overloaded that it can take an eternity to log on. "
/. in the mix sure doesn't help, does it?
Throwing
Wern't java iButtons out before the iMac? Just askin'
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They are probably going to remove the connectors accounts too. Connectors accounts are user created accounts that links people with something in similar. I have connectors on my friends list for my college, favorite game, my car, etc. They act as a social hub and expand my personal network.
Granted these connector accounts are fake, but they make friendster more interesting.
What if I make a website and it gets pulled by the ISP? Censorship? yes. Not any diffrent then a profile being pulled by Friendster, either.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What they should do is allow you to kill file people. You could add Seattle to your killfile and never worry about it again.
But the Friendster people would rather get all authoritarian and alienate people then add a few more lines of code. So whatever.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yeah sure, I'm sure you consider yourself a 'hipster' mr. porn-site.
Face it, no one who operates a porn site can be 'hip'. Deal with it.
Oh, wait...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And, to add an extra level of money-grubbing, on Yahoo at least you can't actually respond to people to reply to your ad unless you ALSO subscribe. Suddenly, one understands why they're willing to let anyone who wants to post a profile, but only after screening. NOT, I suspect, to prevent fakes as the article describes, but rather to make sure you're not giving out any contact info that could be used to contact you without paying Yahoo their subscription fee. Which leaves you two choices - risk said respondee being interested but not enough to pay to subscribe just to reply to you, or give out a real, off-system email address and risk the ad belonging to a porn spam collector (as many messages asking for an off-system email cause said supposed hot dumb blonde can't figure out how to work the site are). Workaround: Hello, pornspammagnet26401@yahoo/hotmail.com. :)
And yes, you're right, getting this one /.'ed is basically saying "just bring it!" to potential fake members.... :)
Ya know, what if Jesus is back and they delete the real Jesus's account... that wouldn't be very nice. Although I don't think it's a sin.... hmmm...
I wonder how big his personal network is...
- Danny
No, you're not paying attention at all! The only thing that makes friendster any good or in anyway appealing is being able to say to your friends "Check out Robo-Jesus." It would just be a stupid dating service without the fakesters and no one would bother looking at lots of banner ads while finding the next "Emo Kid."
They have a right to screw up their service, but they are moronic Stalinists for doing it.
~
If you need me, I'll be hanging my computer from the
I am not a Fakester. I am a real Friendster. The purpose of Friendster is to form social networks, connect with friends, and make new friends. Trust a bunch of idiots to go screw around with that and turn it into a political platform, compensation for their tiny dicks, or a booster for their severe lack of RL friends. "Ooh, I have 3 million people in my personal network for my Jennifer Lopez account! I feel so accomplished!" Get a real life.
And I thought I was friends with the real Saddam Hussein :'(
One word Huminity. If you are looking for social networking this software got it all. With a great "spider" maps drawn to navigate + show connection and with chat features huminity is superior.
...at least according to I.F. Stone.
Stone's thesis was that Socrates (or maybe it was Plato, since it's hard to separate the two) used the freedoms of Golden Age Athens to criticize those freedoms and extoll the virtues of nearby totalitarian states like Sparta. Socrates eventually caused enough grief to convince the Athenians to condemn him to death (perhaps betraying their principles in the process).
I find it interesting that a modern-day fakester-griefer would choose that name for their own griefer nick.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Look at him. And he's "meeting" with another guy online. WTF that's nasty.
Fiendster - they got it right! Think of how hurt they felt to make the site...
In a social network, and it doesn't matter if it's friendster or Instant Messenger or any other kind, each person is naturally part of the verification of the people that are connected to him. If people that you don't know connect to you in ICQ for example, then you disconnect from them. If the friendster network is not that intuitive, then it has a serious malfunction. Connections should be symmetrical, like they do it in Huminity Huminity - this way, people actualy validate the other people that are connected to them.... otherwise, it's not a social network... it's a joke.
Does it matter? If they're smart enough to fool you, maybe they're worth meeting.
Some one sent me Fiendster a joke-friendster web site some time ago... I am a Huminity freak myself. Do I like to see myself in the center of all my friends or can it be that those connections maps they show are hypnotizing :)?
The definition of 'censorship' does not have the word 'government' in it.
Whatever. Depends where you go to find the definition you prefer to use. I guess the Roman censors weren't part of the government. I guess the 'offical' or 'authority' part of the definition doesn't mean government. Yes, I know m-w.com doesn't put it in the definition, however why not check around? You'll surely find it, unless you choose not to. Whatever it says on m-w.com, the connotation alone is certainly one of authority or officials, of which the owner of a matchmaking website is neither.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Yes, and that's the first thing I thought of when I saw it.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
This is the parent poster (posting anonymously) I didn't even know that until I read your post! Doh!
We are the Friendster Collective. You will be assimilated. Unfriendliness is futile.
- Danny
Right, so we've got a community site, and some people start using it in a way the owner didn't anticipate, and the owner decides the new use is contrary to the "purpose" of the site, and decides to engage in an increasingly draconian crackdown on the "disruptive" users, yeah?
Hmm.
I'll betting it's only a matter of time before we find Jon Abrams blaming Friendster's every shortcoming, and its overall failure to quite live up to his "vision," on the tro^H^H^H fakesters.
Copyright (C) 2002-2003 Friendster, Inc. All rights reserved. Patent Pending
I wonder if Slashdot's 'friends and foes' feature is prior art?
I wonder how big his personal network is...
Really, really small. Christians everywhere brag about their "personal relationship" with Jesus, but everyone knows how one-sided the conversation really is. I think most people are conditioned not to point that out for fear of offending someone's religious beliefs.
I wonder how much useless and damaging superstition our society would be freed from if it became acceptable to publicly criticize irrational and/or harmful beliefs and practices in other religions.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
S.A.M!!!!!!!!! yo, this is eduardo cuellar. i wrote a bunch of anime reviews for ultimateanime.com, and ive been lookin like mad for traces of u or chris foster. Anyway, ive been wanting to save copies of the anime reviews i wrote for that site, but im unable to access the site. if the site has a new address, or if u or chris foster have backup copies of my reviews saved, please contact me, man. my address is pinksuezo@hotmail.com . Please write, man, since i dont check these boards.
http://www.angelfire.com/dragon/pinkpredatorsex
Hmmm?
Fuck you in advance.
After reading that article, I think John Abrams must be an excellent CEO. He has all the neccessary qualifications: being a self-important asshole.
I went to the site and realized that you cannot create a fake identity and trick people with it. Friendster only lets you browse or search friends or friends of friends. You must create a network and bring it into friendster--you cannot search or view general users. Once you sign up your friends you could create a fake person and link to your real identity. But it would be easy to trace since the system shows you how people are connected. For example, someone posted a link to a fake profile here on slashdot...i cant access it...i'm not connected :(
i wonder if they are using a dag and oracle's connectby to model their community
All your preview button are belong to hello kitty.