Friendster Fights Fakesters

jerkface writes "Matchmaking/personal networking site Friendster is experiencing a 'problem'. Unruly individuals like John Locke, Socrates, Alf, and many incarnations of Jesus Christ are trying to take over the site, according to SFWeekly.com. For a few months, the 'fakesters' were mostly tolerated, so long as they didn't offend anyone with the images they posted. Fakester profiles exist claiming to be famous people (alive and dead), cities, buildings, abstract concepts, and - increasingly - Friendster CEO Jon Abrams. Abrams is now saying they're all going to be deleted because they ruin the site. Fakesters argue he's stifling the full potential of the site, and many people report that 100% genuine profiles have been deleted in the recent campaigns against fakesters."

salon

[fishmonkey]

There's a feature on the same topic at salon [salon.com]

That's FEDERAL interference

[Burb]

Freedom of speech is protected, but only from Federal Governmental interference. The phrase Congress shall make no law... means that the responsibility to make such laws devolves to the states.

entropy?

[autopr0n]

I think you used the word entropy way wrong. How does 'people interacting' create more microstates that have the same microstate?

I think the word you are looking for is chaos, or maybe you should have just said "large numbers of people interacting will cause unexpected results"

Entropy is the number if microstates, the individual kinetic energy of each particle) that have the same 'macrostate', like the heat.

For example a block of ice has lower entropy then a glass of water because in the ice the water molecules can only move around a little bit, while in the water they can move all over the place, and have many more possible amounts of kinetic energy.

The 'entropy' in Friendster would be the connections that could be severed without changing the over-all macrostate of the site. So if bob is connected to everyone that Jane is connected to, and he deletes Jane, it doesn't affect anyone else on the site. These fakesters actually do add entropy because lots of people connect to them. In some cases you could drop a whole group of them without changing the over all state for anyone else.

(anyway, please let me know if I made any mistakes in my explanation of entropy)