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Got No Friends? Nevermind Here's SomeYou Can Have

Lets just say a "friend" of mine has so far managed to resist the lure of Facebook. Unfortunately this "friend" soon found that an increasing amount of useful stuff is accessible only to Facebookers so he (or she) created a bogus account in a fake name just to get access when needed to various Facebooky things. (A gross violation of the Terms of Service, I know, shame on them. I am not sure if this is an imprison-able offence yet but doubtless it soon will be). 

Anyhow given that the entire account is a fake you should not be surprised to hear that this "friend" never bothered to connect to any other friends via this fake account. Indeed this reasonably tech savvy individual even managed to negotiate their way through Facebook's less than transparent privacy options to turn off all of the normal intrusions that Facebook makes.

So far so good but the "friend was most surprised when Facebook started sending him (or her) emails noting with obvious sympathy that he (or she) has no friends.The helpful service offered to find friends for the fake persona and even made several named suggestions to kick the process off.

I am happy to say that, to date, this "friend" has declined Facebook's invitation to broaden his (or her) imaginary persona's circle of acquaintances. Nevertheless the notion of constructing a fully fleshed out virtual alter ego complete with a computer generated social network is tempting.



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Cap'n John said…
I have two FB accounts. Actually, I have three.

The first account is my own. It's the account I created when I first joined FB, and it's the one my RL friends & family use to find me and keep in touch.

But life in FB would not be complete without playing a few games so I started playing a few games and then discovered that to get the most out of many of the FB games you need to be friends with a lot of people, because some of the games are team games, like Mafia Wars, where your Crew is made up of all your FB Friends, but only those who play Mafia Wars. Sure, you can play MW without having a lot of friends but it helps to have several who do play MW because some MW missions require your FB Friends to help you. Then there's the PvP game, and the people who play MW have no mercy (go figure) and will not hesitate, not even for a second, to come down like a ton of bricks on someone with a much smaller Crew than them.

I realized that if I didn't want the other players constantly attacking me, robbing me, etc., I needed a big Crew of my own, which meant I needed a lot more Friends. So I spammed the MW message board with "Friend Me!" requests, and I sent Friend Invites to a bunch of people myself, and before I knew it I had well over 500 FB Friends.

Then my brother-in-law in Australia crashed his car (not badly hurt, just broke his foot) but I didn't know about it because nobody called me to tell me, and I missed his FB post where he mentioned it, because it got buried among all the game posts.

So I created a second FB account using a fake name, specifically for gaming, and I pruned my Friends List on my real FB account. I currently have 190 FB Friends on my "real" account and they're all people I know IRL. Some I haven't seen since Primary School, but I've still known them IRL at one time or another.

My wife has a FB account too, and she played MW and other games even more than me. And when she discovered I'd created a second FB account she began using it, too. Except she plays more games than me so my fake FB account was suddenly swamped with all these extra posts for games I had no interest in playing.

So...

I created a third FB account. For me :P

I had some fun with this one because I kept it secret from my wife for a while, but I did send her a Friend Invite which she accepted. Occasionally I'd comment on her wall posts as my alter ego (a 70-year old widower from Melbourne, Australia ;) and would then proceed to have a conversation with myself. Eventually my wife discovered the old guy posting on her wall was really me. I also eventually stopped playing MW and many of the other time-consuming games (at least WoW has a level Cap, MW just keeps going) but by then my wife had taken over my third account.

Occasionally I'll jump on the computer and open up Chrome to check Facebook (the wife uses Firefox, I use Chrome, for the most part) only to discover I've been logged out, and one or the other of my alter egos is now logged in. It's almost as if they've taken on a life of their own ;)
7:31 pm
mbp said…
Lol Capn John you are way ahead of me in manipulating Facebook. I am still struggling with the concept of "keeping an account secret from my wife" though - might generate some spouse aggro when she found out.
9:44 pm
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