Author Archives: zephoria

Types of Fakesters/Fraudsters

I realized that i never wrote down the different types of Fakesters/Fraudsters that i’ve been observing. Here are a few that i can think of right now. [Let me know if there are other ones that you’ve seen.]

Play Characters.. These characters are meant for fun and entertainment, and to allow people with common interests to connect.

  • Famous character or person. examples: Homer Simpson, Stanley Milgram, Drew Barrymore
  • Place (university, city, bar, etc.). examples: Brown University, New Jersey, Lexington
  • Objects, animals, creatures, mythical figures. examples: Salt, Giant Squid, LSD
  • Identity markers. examples: Black Lesbians, FemSex
  • Concepts. examples: Fear, Pure Evil, Infinity
  • Tribes (real life communities). examples: Infinite Kaos, Space Cowboys

Passable Characters. These characters are meant to appear real on the system.

  • Unwilling friends. i.e. my friend Andy refuses to create an Friendster account so i’ll create one for him, use a picture of him that i have, and link to all of his friends
  • Friend supporters. i.e. a group of guys create a girl to give them good testimonials and introduce them to other girls.
  • Bait. i.e. a passable character, often female, meant to see if “she” can pick up tons of other characters in the system by flirting.
  • Clones/Spite-based Fraudsters. i.e. Jonathan Abrams needs to learn a lesson so i’ll create an image of him or his friends and try to communicate with various friends of his to toy with the system.

Note: Cloning is pretty common now. “Fake” characters as well as “real” characters are often cloned. There are tons of Jedis, Jesus Christs and Jonathan Abrams.

There are also Collectors – people who collect one type of fake character.

There are also Friendster whores – people who simply collect as many people as possible, including Fakesters.

[Revised on 9/13 based on lots of good feedback.]

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HICSS paper accepted

Fernanda Viegas and i wrote a paper for HICSS called Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments and the draft was accepted. This means that we now need to edit it based on the reviewers’ comments and resubmit for publication.

I’m quite excited about this because i think that we’re getting at some interesting points in that paper. Basically, we stepped back from the two email visualization projects and reflected on their value. We realized that we have all of this social interaction in digital spaces without meaningful artifacts for remembering. Photographs are such valuable tools for sharing events in real life, but those same elements don’t exist online. When we created SNF and PostHistory, we realized that they ended up providing that opportunity accidentally. This is interesting because it makes us reflect on the value of such artifacts for social interaction. While digital communication allows us to have all of the archives of our experience, it doesn’t give us the quick coarse snapshops that let us reflect in a meaningful manner.

One of the things that i love about submitting to HICSS is that the reviews are always so meaningfully critical. Needless to say, all of the reviewers commented on our failure to evaluate our tools. And they are right: we didn’t. Of course, i still think that the value in what we built was more in the thought element than in any suggestion that this is a meaningful tool for distribution. Or maybe that’s just my excuse for not having had time to evaluate. But i really am not sure what a meaningful evaluation for SNF would’ve been. I certainly don’t think that it is a distributable tool (even if people keep asking to download it). Another common thread in the reviews was that they didn’t understand why anyone would want to use this tool continuously. This makes me think that we didn’t make our arguments strong enough. Just as people don’t use photographs regularly, they wouldn’t want to use any such tool as a means of information retrieval. Instead, these are artifacts to bring out during times of sharing or curiousity, not as a daily ritual. Aside from these two common threads, everything else in the reviews was inconsistent. Some reviewers loved our writing; others despised it. Some thought we were on to something; others thought the tools were pointless. Still, the various perspectives were quite valuable and certainly motivate me to want to publish there more often, even if attending the conference is a *huge* dent in the pocket.

stone butch blues

For the last year or so, Stone Butch Blues has been out of print. This has made me utterly frustrated since it’s one of the few books that i constantly buy for others to read. I went to hear Leslie Feinberg (the author) speak once and she said that the purpose of SBB was to communicate gender theory through life experience. The story is so poignant, revealing all of the emotions that one feels when experience gender confusion.

I still remember the night that i read it. I was in undergrad and working for the summer. I felt really ill so i went home early from work to sleep. I picked up SBB. Every hour or so i had to put it down because i was crying so intensely, but i could never put it down for long. I watched the sun rise the next morning as i finished the story, forever moved.

Anyhow, i just got an email message from Leslie Feinberg:

I’m happy to announce that a new edition of Stone Butch Blues is being published by Alyson. The book will be available in stores by spring 2004. Copies may be in the warehouse as early as November 2003.

The distributor is Consortium. Their phone number is (800) 283-3572. The ISBN for Stone Butch Blues is 1-55583-853-7.

It’s a must read.

Friendster growth

While i was away, someone pointed me to a paper called Warhol Worms: The Potential for Very Fast Internet Plagues. The paper documents how a worm gets distributed through the Internet and how its exponential growth caps out at around 1,000,000 people. I was encouraged to read this because one question that’s been on my mind is how long Friendster growth will continue and whether or not it will just cap out. For a while, it was growing at 10% per week, but this hasn’t been maintained all summer.

While i don’t have the data about signup dates, i did trapse back and look at join dates for a variety of numbers, just to get a sense of when certain numbers were hit. Unfortunately, this isn’t as valuable as the actual dates, but it’s interesting none-the-less:

User 101 (Jonathan) signed on in April 2002.
User 175 signed on in May 2002.
User 250 signed on in June 2002.
User 375 signed on in July 2002.
User 500 signed on in August 2002.
User 1000 signed on in September 2002.
User 1250 signed on in October 2002.
User 1500 signed on in November 2002.
User 2500 signed on in December 2002.
User 5000 signed on in January 2003.
User 10,000 signed on in February 2003.
User 25,000 signed on in February 2003.
User 50,000 signed on in March 2003.
User 100,000 signed on in April 2003.
User 250,000 signed on in May 2003.
User 500,000 signed on in June 2003.
User 750,000 signed on in June 2003.
User 1,000,000 signed on in July 2003.
User 1,250,000 signed on in July 2003.
User 1,500,000 signed on in August 2003.
User 1,750,000 signed on in August 2003.

[As of August 31, there are 1,853,799 User accounts]

Needless to say, Friendster is well beyond the 1M marker, but it’s hard to tell how much beyond. While there are close to 2M accounts, i have no sense of how many of them are fake or invalid. Plus, i keep running into people who have multiple accounts (same information, same name, all “real”). I can’t tell if this is because they forgot their login or because they want to separate different friend groups.

Also, so many of the account seem to be inactive. I still hypothesize that people have an interest span of around 2 months from when the last group of friends joined. ::sigh:: Of course, without the data, it’s hard to test my hypotheses.

Urban Singles @ Commonwealth Club

Bay Area folks: The Commonwealth Club (San Francisco) is hosting a forum on Urban Singles on September 4th. Speakers include:

RABBI YAACOV DEYO, Founder, SpeedDating
TRISH MCDERMOTT, Vice President, Match.com
JONATHAN ABRAMS, Founder, Friendster
JEFF TITTERTON, Vice President, PlanetOut Partners

Also, for those who are curious, i suspect that the Fakester Revolution folks will be there protesting.

lessons in the desert

Going to the desert is always an extremely intense experience for me. There is nothing like spending a week in an extremely hostile environment to shake everything up. So, needless to say, the desert taught me a few lessons. I’m now back and processing.

To back up… Burning Man is an annual festival held in Black Rock City (Nevada). 30,000+ people trek to the desert to build a community, construct large art projects and party. By Saturday, hedonism is at an all time high, in preparation for burning the man, a large glowing structure at the center of the city. On Sunday, repentence is had as people burn away the year’s sorrows at the mausoleum (called the Temple of Honor this year).

I am in awe with the creation of the city and the community. In theory, there is a balance between construction and destruction, as everything created is burnt or torn down… leave no trace. Unfortunately, a rush of people come towards the end of the week to party and help destroy. It feels so odd since these people are not the same as those who help create. As a result, i always feel myself going from awe to irritation.

I remember standing at the Burn last year listening as folks on my left yelled slurs at the girls in their drunken frenzy while those on my right repeated their vows of love over and over again in their ecstasy-driven cuddle puddle.

This year, i went at the absolute beginning of the week, in part for personal reasons and in part to watch the community evolve from an anthropological perspective. I vowed to leave when i had enough, when i was losing track of the beauty of it all. And thus, i came home early, on the day of the Burn.

[more personal reflections inside]

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i’m back…

I’m back from the desert. It was a completely intense experience, as always, and i’m still processing. Bits of what i learned will slowly leak out here and updates will begin again.