OK not really a surprise, but I've been on the friendship building cruise again. I suspect that in the next couple of days I'll end up going over 2000 friends. I don't expect anything super fantastic to happen then, or for that matter anything really different. There may be another change in what shows up in my view of my profile, but I'm not too worried about that.

And that's not really what this blog entry is about.

Nope, this one is about 'reality' or the lack there of in entirely too many people's lives.

I've seen a few different profiles lately. Hardly a surprise there is there. As an observation, Most guy's profiles are fairly basic. Oh, they've been customized of course, colors, backgrounds, the usual stuff, but it's still the basic MySpace layout.

Actually that's the case with most women's profiles as well. However once we get past the something over 'half' that makes 'most' women's profiles basic, you start to see all sorts of diffferent things. A small percentage have the columns flipped. I.e. the user's profile picture is on the right rather than the left. A bit more than that have some sort of a content management flash ui. So instead of seeing the different blocks with their associated information embeded in them, that information is presented by the flash interface as the viewer moves the mouse over different things, or clicks on them. Oddly enough, this group presents a worse problem for me than the really small percentage of people who only want to add people they already know. The problem is that not every flash viewer makes the interactive elements interactive. So the 'Add me as a friend' button doesn't 'click' and you can't send an invite to them.

Oh, well, a loss, but that's OK.

The next group of people that I find having some incongruity in their profile are the 'bi' women who don't want male friends. The reality of the situation is that they have established a myspace profile as a lesbian, but don't want people to think of them as lesbians. That's OK too. I happen to prefer women myself, and have no problem with women who have an interest in women, even if they may never have an interest in me. In all honesty, the only subset of this group that concerns me are the women who bury a note in their profile saying that invitations from guys will be flagged as spam. Personally I have finer grained conditions for flagging an invitation as spam, but if a woman wants to tag any guy who happens to think she's attractive, and might be worthy of being considered a friend as a spammer, I guess that's her prerogative.

The 'odd' profiles are the 'Official' or 'Real' profiles of people. How many profiles are there of Pam Anderson? How many are 'really her!'? I'm reasonably confident that there are 'several' Pamela Anderson profiles. (Probably a few Pamela Andersen's as well.) It wouldn't surprise me all that much if there was a Pam Anderson (or en) behind the majority of them. The ones that people get concerned about are those of the Celebrityh Pamela Anderson. There very well may be a few 'Official' profiles of her. And don't question her about it either, she's liable to get upset and flag your question as spam and try to get you kicked off MySpace for even doubting that this is her profile.

OK, Whatever. First of all, most of the fraudulent profiles are related to people who've found pictures of the celeb, and who've decided that making those pictures available to others is a good way to get attention, and build friends. OK. I don't happen to think it's a very worthwhile method, but then if you need a way to get a vector for some computer infection gets around, I suspect that it will work.

In any case, what makes the page 'Official?' Is there some judge or appraiser who has stamped their certification on the page and made it 'official'? Nope. It's almost universally 'official' because the user claims it is their official page. They edit their profile, and add the words 'Official MySpace Profile of...' or words to that effect. So if there is no governing body vetting you from adding it to your profile, what's to prevent the fraud from putting it on their page? Nothing. In other words claiming that your profile page is the one and only official MySpace page for you is probably the silliest thing you can do on MySpace. Well, OK, that or hold the camera in front of your face when taking a picture of yourself in the bathroom mirror, but that's a different matter.

I've been asked how many of the people I have as friends on MySpace have I actually met. I have not even met all of the people on my 'top' list. (Though I would love to sit and chat with every single one of them.) If I meet 1% of my MySpace friends in real life, I would be very surprised. Oh, I have plenty of friends who I don't have as friends on MySpace, but some part of that is the fact that I have lots of online friends who wouldn't think of setting up a MySpace page for whatever reason. So it balances out at some level.

There are also people who ask how many of my friends profiles are really of them? Again, it doesn't really matter. Are there celebrities who've had fake profiles set up? Sure. I would suspect that less than 1% of my friends profiles are 'fakes'. Now that doesn't mean that there are not a significant number that don't have the reported person actually behind the profile. As an example, the Playmate and Pet profiles that have a common 'Add Me' theme in their 'contacting ...' block, I suspect are 'managed' profiles. The odds of actually getting a message from the Playmate or Pet, using that profile are pretty low in my opinion. Likewise profiles with hundreds of thousands of friends are likely to be managed at some level. It may be that the user has farmed out approving comments and friend adds to someone else, but is handling all the messages themselves. But if you get what sounds like a canned response, you begin to wonder.

As an observation on a couple of those points. If you find that I've added a profile that's using your pictures to present themselves as you, feel free to take up the matter of misappropriated pictures with the MySpace people. I have no control over those people, and I'm just as likely to include you in the people that I drop if you ask me to drop them as a friend. Here's why. As with the 'Offical' or 'Real' tag on a profile, I have nothing immediately available to verify that the person requesting that I drop someone is any more likely to be the 'real' or 'official' person than that the profile is for the Real person. Additionally I am being a bit indiscriminate in the adding of people, so I'll probably be indiscriminate in purging them as well. It's not something personal. For the vast majority of my friends, it can't be personal, as I don't know the person in the first place.

Well, that's going to do it for now. I think it's time I got some sleep.