Friendster flashbacks as Facebook goes after fakesters
It seemed like only yesterday that Jonathan Abrams was waging an all-out war against "fakesters," or made-up public profiles on his social networking startup Friendster — because lord knows, we can't have people misrepresenting themselves on the Internet. Now it's Facebook's turn to play the heavy, with users of the PackRat application getting multiple accounts deleted. Players of the social card game were signing up under pseudonyms in order to give themselves an advantage in the social card game.Facebook has been notoriously stuck up about making sure users are identified strictly by their government names. Now both heavy users generating an excess of pageviews and an application developer that depends on the company's "platform" are feeling the wrath from above for sinning against the terms of service. Certainly the "tyrannical, omnipotent" style of divine rule didn't end up working so well for Friendster — Facebook is popular and growing, but punishing its most devoted acolytes like Job can't work in the long run.