http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/technology/26fake.html?ref=technology

While there are many large scale social networks on the internet, none are as popular as MySpace.com. MySpace is a social networking website that allows users to build a network of friends, their own personal profiles, and access to groups, photos, music, videos, and blogs. As a result, it is pretty easy for someone to find information about a person’s lifestyle and character by simply looking at their MySpace page. In addition to displaying personal information, your MySpace page also shows a roster of all of your friends. The above link discusses a relatively new company, FakeYourSpace.com, which offers its users a way to enhance their personal MySpace accounts. For a small charge of 99 cents a month per “friend”, you can hire people to not only become your “friend”, but to post on your own personal page. The big perk about the addition of these newfound “friends”, is that they consist mainly of attractive models. Bryant Walker, founder of FakeYourSpace, says the purpose of his site is “to turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets” by providing fictitious postings from attractive people.

FakeYourSpace creates an interesting dilemma to basic social networking theory. Generally, social networks consist of a group of people with each person represented by a node. Whenever two people have a relationship, whether it be due to friendship, romance, finance, etc., they are connected by an edge. However, the emergence of FakeYourSpace creates a significant amount of fake edges in the MySpace social network. By simply paying this monthly fee, a person can increase his social circle significantly without actually creating any new relationships. If one were to study the social relationships of a FakeYourSpace customer, they would surely encounter some problems. For example, if this fictitious “friend” posted several times on your MySpace page, you would conclude that the two have a strong relationship. If another one of your actual friends had similar behavior, you would also be able to classify the relationship as strong. As a result, you would conclude that these two friends would develop at least a weak relationship (triadic closure). However, since the FakeYourSpace “friend” doesn’t actually exist, no such relationship would ever develop. These new fake relationships would definitely be something that sociologist would have to consider if they ever wanted to study the interactions of MySpace users.