Their battle strategies are often as ridiculous and pointless as their Friendster profiles. One of the Jesuses, for instance, encourages fakesters to flag the profiles of "uninteresting" realsters. Such people, he says, include those who list Adam Sandler among their favorite movie stars or cite "chillin'" as one of their interests.
When you add a friend on Friendster, you must verify that you know him by providing his last name or e-mail address. Deleted fakesters with hundreds of friends had to start from scratch with their clones. Through FriendsterRevolution, the fictional profilers collected each other's e-mail addresses so that they could easily build back the friend networks of their new clones. One fakester even wrote a program that automatically sent friend requests to this e-mail list and confirmed anybody who asked him to be his friend. (This tactic was controversial, however, as some fakesters saw it as spam.)
Paolo Vescia
Friendster CEO Jonathan Abrams thought Internet
dating was "creepy."
Anthony Pidgeon
Lisa Sebasco created a fake profile named after a
dyke bar -- and attracted many new lesbian friends.
Fomenting revolution was a new pastime for fakesters, and their shenanigans became more daring. One of the Jesuses hatched the idea of "self-actualized clones" that displayed their e-mail addresses and passwords in their profiles. Like a house with an open door, anybody could come in and use them. Morgan Johnson, a San Franciscan who operates the fakester Giant Squid, pioneered the use of "kamikaze clones" -- fakesters who send vitriolic messages to Abrams, knowing that he'll quickly delete their profiles.
Though to an outsider the fakester uprising might have looked like a big practical joke, there were serious issues behind it.
"It's symbolic of a larger cultural battle," says an East Bay fakester who asked to be identified only by his profile name, Slushie Petersun. "Creative self-expression is being whittled away in this country because of lawsuits over copyright issues and media mergers."
Roy Batty passionately agrees. "If we continue to allow corporations to dictate what we do or say, it undermines our entire way of life in this country," he says. "If we go down in flames, at least we'll feel like we tried to accomplish something."
When it began, the Internet offered a world of new opportunities for anonymous communication and self-representation. Here was a unique medium that revealed nothing about you -- not the way you looked, the sound of your voice, or even your handwriting. The possibilities for self-invention were nearly limitless -- and, some would say, highly liberating. Online, you have far more control over how people perceive you, free from stereotypes about race, gender, income, and age. But the people behind Friendster want to make their site as unlike the Internet as possible.
"The idea is how you would really meet someone at a beach party," says Friendster COO Lindstrom. "We want people to feel comfortable, for people's behavior to be what's normally socially acceptable."
Abrams says he wants Friendster to be "like eBay" in its mass appeal. But not everybody watching the Friendster phenomenon thinks this is the greatest business strategy.
"Friendster is going up against Match.com and Yahoo! Personals, which are huge," says David Card, an analyst who covers online dating sites for Jupitermedia, a Darien, Conn.based firm that sells research reports to corporations about trends in the information technology industry. "The only way to compete is to appeal to a niche, whether it's bondage, or fetish, or black, or gay. His niche could be 'interesting' people, but if he doesn't like 'interesting' people ...."
Of course, what's socially acceptable to one user is censorship to another. And many fakesters argue -- convincingly -- that their behavior is no more fake than a lot of realsters'. It's a cliché that everybody bends the truth in a personal ad. And even on Friendster, which is full of hipsters pretending they're not on the site for dating, there's just as much pretense. For instance, how much do you really know about a guy who lists his interests as "unnecessarily speaking of himself in the third person" and describes himself as having "my drivers license and an eliptical [sic] soul"?
"At least we're more real about being fake," gripes one fakester.
In the final analysis, Friendster is Jonathan Abrams' beach party, and he gets to decide who is acceptable and who isn't. He built his site as a way of getting himself dates, not to chat with a Jesus impersonator.
As we talk, Abrams admits that Friendster's success has killed his social life; it's more than a little ironic that he has his very own dating site, but no time to date. He asks me if I have any cute single friends. I do, and one's even a Friendster member. But I have to point out that her online picture is of a funny little schmoo-like shark head. Abrams rolls his eyes and opens up my profile page to look at my collection of friends, many of whom present distinctly nonhuman miens.
"Oh, I get it. Your friends are all smartass types," he says in exasperation. He types a message to my shark-faced friend. "Hi Kerry," he writes. "Your profile looks interesting. Too bad you have such a silly picture."
