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Others are just plain twisted. The fakester Catboon, who Photoshopped two kitten heads onto the body of a baboon, enjoys music by Burt Bacharach and lists his interests simply as "bourbon." "My master got me on his last trip to London, where I was being used as a street freak," Catboon writes in the "about me" section.
Fakesters "keep levity and parody alive on an otherwise boring dating service for vapid and conceited scenesters and inept losers," is how one of the Jesuses put it. But they're also breaking the rules.
Friendster's corporate headquarters is located in an anonymous-looking Sunnyvale office park that a few years ago would have been buzzing with dot-com start-ups. Friendster shares the building with a few other companies; only a handful of cars is in the parking lot.
Jonathan Abrams is thin and fidgety, with salt-and-pepper hair and big blue eyes that are quick to narrow suspiciously. He sits in an office that has not one shred of decoration. To keep up with Friendster's explosive growth, Abrams often works far into the night seven days a week -- user demand continues to overload the new servers he and his staff keep adding. Abrams looks tired, and is not easily amused.
In early July, Friendster's affable chief operating officer, Kent Lindstrom, told me the only fakesters that the company would likely remove would be ones it received complaints about. (On Friendster, users can "flag" somebody's profile for the company to review, and write comments about why it offended them.) But Abrams shakes his head emphatically when I mention this.
"No. They're all going," he says, his voice steely. "All of them."
A native of Canada, Abrams is a former Netscape programmer and entrepreneur who in 1999 founded and later sold a company called HotLinks that compiled people's favorite Web sites into a public directory. He built Friendster last summer as a way to meet women. He likes to tell interviewers that the project was prompted by the breakup of a two-year relationship, but he doesn't like it when I probe for details of exactly who dumped whom. "Isn't that a little personal?" he snaps.
Abrams saw that his friends were using online dating sites to meet women, so he decided to try it. But Internet hookups felt "random and anonymous" to him.
He envisioned a matchmaking site that worked more like real life, in which friends introduce you to available people. Through connections in the high-tech sector, he raised about $400,000 in seed money and, in June 2002, launched a private version for his friends to try out. By March, he had a free beta test version up and running and invited the public. Starting later this month, Friendster users will have to pay about $8 per month if they want to send e-mail messages to users who aren't already their friends -- a cheaper version of a payment strategy that has worked well for other matchmaking sites like Match.com.
Abrams says he always knew Friendster would be "more than just a dating site," but he doesn't share the fakesters' vision of what it should be. Fakesters, he claims, expose him to possible lawsuits by companies like Disney, whose characters or images get co-opted by fakesters. He also thinks the fictional profiles screw up the networking effect.
"The whole point of Friendster is that you're connected to somebody through mutual friends, not by virtue of the fact that you both like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups," he says.
Fakesters also create problems by adding friends indiscriminately in contests to see who can collect the most. Some, like God Almighty, have more than 1,000 friends. Loading profiles with that many connections strains Friendster's already overloaded servers. Hence the company recently hired a customer service rep who sporadically deletes fakesters, and plans to step up these efforts in the future.
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.
"We have no way of knowing if that cat is really your cat, or a copyrighted image," Abrams says firmly. "The pictures are supposed to be a means of identifying you." But he acknowledges that Friendster has yet to receive a cease-and-desist letter from a company whose name or image is being used by fakesters.
Digital copyright attorney Martin Schwimmer says Abrams has little to worry about in terms of such copying.
"I can go on AOL and have the user name HarleyLover@aol.com and I'm not going to be sued for it, unless I'm selling motorcycle parts through my user name or something," says Schwimmer. The bigger danger to Friendster, he says, is fraud. He cites a recent Village Voice article about Friendster that recounts an incident in which a user posed as a celebrity and persuaded women to send him naked pictures of themselves. "That is the definition of fraud," says Schwimmer. "One cannot fault Friendster for saying, 'These are our ground rules, you have to say who you really are.'"
One night in June, Arthur Ratnick logged onto Friendster before going to bed and saw his logo had been replaced by a gray question mark -- the default graphic for users who haven't uploaded a digital picture of themselves. Pure Evil had been struck down!
Ratnick immediately "cloned" Pure Evil by setting up another e-mail account and re-creating the same profile. Within an hour, the new Pure Evil had been taken down. The war was on.
