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Imaginary Friends
Walter posted this to the Social software intellectuals tribe (hey, I didn't make up the name...):
"Fraudsters:" pro, con, indifferent?
I'd be curious to hear what you all think about individuals with profiles that aren't pegged to their actual persona. If someone creates a "Cheez Whiz" or "George Washington" identity, what do they bring to the party? Do they reduce the value/utility of the network as a whole? Discuss.
To which I replied:
Can you imagine LinkedIn with Jesus?
Friendster always seemed more light-hearted, so why not leave the Fraudsters.
Also, kind of depends on how you link. If you link often/casually, then "fake" profiles are no big deal. If you tend to link sparsley/deeply, you'll skip over those.
I can't, at the moment, think of how Fraudsters might harm a network, other than by consuming some infinitesmal bit of resources.
And then there was this article from SFWeekly. It's a long discussion of fraudsters/fakesters, including talking with the creator of Friendster, Jonathan Abrams. Friendster is taking a very hard-line stance:
Friendster aims to take down not only fakesters' phony pictures but also those of "realsters" who post images other than of their own faces. That means users who prefer visual anonymity are out of luck -- like a friend of mine who pictures his cat on Friendster because he'd once been recognized on the street from his original Friendster profile and didn't like it.
Ridiculous. Sounds like a company whose business plan got screwed up, and doesn't know what to do about it. I have a picture of some monkeys in my photo album on Tribe...I could make that my image. And what about people that like having a quirky Photoshop face?
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I am not particularly bothered if on a web-forum, the information is real or unreal. It should be coherent and well thought through. A well told story, or a well made point is always enjoyable.
What is of not particular value is if the prose consists of dangling phrases, as it often does; or if it has a large number cross references to other sites in an arbitrary fashion, without communicating anything that allows a new understanding.
At some point of course, one may wish to extend a web association into a collaborative project bound by resources and time; which gives a fraudster an opportunity to flavour a different kind of stock.
Well according to Metcalf's Law, the value of a network ultimately diminishes by the number of "Fraudsters" on an exponential level, so the relationship is a simple one:
V = N Squared - F Squared
V = The value of a network.
N = The sum of all nodes in a network, be they computers, people, IP addresses, etc.
F = The number of fraudulent nodes in the network.
I am a hybrid Fraudster. I don't like giving out my information so readily, so I use fake things. Traditionally, I've used a picture of Steve Jobs for all picture entries, and whatever comes to mind for an occupation when it is required. That said, I'm still active in the network while it's interesting.
Explain how Fraudsters "damage" a network. Yes, I know Metcalf's Law, but that is *assuming* that Fraudsters have a 0 or negative value. If people enjoy interacting with them, and actually stay in a network longer/at all because of them, then Fraudsters are just as important. Perhaps more so, if they keep a network from stagnating or shrinking.
The info part is a problem. On the one hand, I want the networks to be totally open, linkable/searchable via Google. On the other hand, it opens up robots scraping info, etc. The way things are now, with these sites living behind a wall of authentication, I'm not too worried about putting my info out there. Heck, my last name and my email aren't anywhere to see, so it's all good.
Actually, I re-read the definition of Metcalf's Law and realized that it doesn't matter who you are, the more people are on any given "network", the more valuable it is, Fraudsters and all.
What I should have said is people who sign-up for any given network and don't participate add precisely zero value to the network.
But Boris, you yourself implied Fraudsters detract from the value of the network in your message to "Be the real you", so by their very definition, Fraudsters detract more than people who are comfortable giving out their name, picture, occupation, and as much information as Tribe.net asks for.
(Note: Graham is talking about a comment I sent him in Tribe after I saw that he had signed up with a picture of Steve Jobs)
You had many questions about how social networks might help or how they add to traditional forms of connections/communication. To truly experience that, you need to be "you", so I encouraged you to fill in some "real" information. There is a place for Fraudsters -- I might even start one with a different persona, linking promiscously, just to see what happens. Somehow I think I would have trouble pulling it off...
Think of all the info that Tribe asks for as a starting point -- something for people to work with. In fact, many people are intrigued by the very answers that you put down, and some will be more interested in you if you put down "quirky" answers. Fraudsters will have a different experience on any network than "themselves", I think, in that other people will automatically relate to them differently. I don't think of this as bad or good, just different.
My stated thought at the moment, for the record, is that Fraudsters are a necessary, healthy part of some social networks. I don't think that "serious" networks like LinkedIn benefit from them at all, but this may in fact point to a failing in those networks.