FakeYourSpace -- what Bruce Sneier calls a "social network reputation hack" -- was admonished by iStockPhoto for violating licensing agreements. The "reputation hack" used stock photos of models to create attractive fictional profiles. Those in need of social juice would for $0.99 a month have their profiles burnished with these fake friends. iStockPhoto construed the activity as implied endorsements by the photo models -- a no-no according to the license -- so asked to have the pictures pulled. FakeYourSpace, supposedly getting 50,000 hits a day since their launch in early December 2006, has complied with the request and will be down until they relaunch March 1st, when they have presumably found another source of profile images. I wonder what the real friends of FakeYourSpace clients will think when these fake profile pics disappear then change en masse. (nyt story)

(Lest we forget our social networking heritage, Pretendster was the first "social network reputation hack" service.)

Fake profiles and spam no doubt contributes greatly to the technical difficulties at MySpace, which had a hours long mail blackout this weekend, the evening / morning hours of Feb 24 - 25. FakeYourSpace target networks are MySpace, Facebook, Consumating, and Friendster. Of the four, Facebook is most relevant, with sticky and fast growing membership. With the academic membership restrictions eased, Facebook has become a lot livelier: I now get DC party promotions in my box everyday. But lively is at the border of chaos -- how will Facebook beat back the likes of FakeYourSpace and keep it real? The captcha hasn't made an appearance on Facebook yet, but even that turing test may not be enough as it has merely slowed the automators on MySpace. They may need to borrow from the sophisticated algorithms used in fraud detection.

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