You can't make this up - latest from Planet Facebook, in response to a game (Packrat) that - horrors - makes people who don't know each other offline want to be friends online to trade in the game:
Please note that Facebook accounts are meant for authentic usage only. This means that we expect accounts to reflect mainly “real-world” contacts (i.e. your family, schoolmates, co-workers, etc.), rather than mainly “internet-only” contacts. As stated on our home page, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you, not a “social networking site”. It is meant to help reinforce pre-existing social connections, not build large groups of new ones. If this is in direct contrast to what you expected as legitimate Facebook usage, I apologize for any confusion. This is simply the intention behind the site.
Saw the story
on TechCrunch, who note that a big part of the game is “stealing” cards from friends, and so a lot of users add other users as friends so that their cards can be obtained. The application’s popularity has also led some users to create Facebook accounts for the sole purpose of playing the game.
Facebook's action is an interesting play, as the ostensible reasons are clearly chimeras, for 2 reasons;
(i) Given that Facebook was quite happy for Mr Scoble et al to have many thousands of users in those early days when getting hype flowing was critical. Not only that, but creating fake ID's on Facebook is still a popular sport, Packrat or no. (Just check out the no. of Jesus's, Attilla and Julius Caesars for example) With success comes the luxury of being more discriminating in ones friends.
(ii) By and large Social Nets do facilitate new online friendships of people who don't know each other, its what they do. Will Facebook now go back and ask everyone to check whom of their friends they have actually met? Thought not, so that precept is nonsense.
So why do this? What is really going on? This is unlikely to be for the benefit of the users, thats not Facebook's raison d'etre, so what is hurting Facebook here? Here's one clue:
The company behind the application, Alamofire, says that users generate up to 500 daily page views per day on the application trying to hunt down the right card to complete a collection.
We suspect thats a cost to Facebook, with very little (if any) commensurate Ad benefit.
Update - Facebook has clarified (if thats the word) their position:
To simplify this a bit, users on Facebook cannot have more than one account and creating another account for the purpose of playing this game violates our Terms of Use. We recognize and appreciate that each person uses Facebook based on their own interests and preferences and are happy to see people meeting new friends on Facebook. To ensure users are comfortable on the site and not burdened by unsolicited contact, we encourage users to add people that reflect their real-world connections and create trusted networks.
Which is boll...incorrect of course. When we researched Social Net dynamics in 2003/4 we found that many people have multiple ID's on social networks (one for work, one for friends for example ). This has been true since the Web 1.0 days, and no doubt always will, and that includes Facebook. As
Dana Boyd notes, backing up our findings::
I did a lot of research on people who held multiple accounts. I was fascinated when I started meeting gay men in Europe who had different SIM cards so that they could decide whether to answer their phone as "gay" or "straight." I know soooo many people who break this TOS for very legitimate reasons involving the potential cost of context collisions. Teachers who have a teacher-friendly profile and a personal one, local politicians and micro-celebrities who have a public profile (not page) and one for their close friends, professionals who have a profile for their college buddies and one for their more presentable side, etc. Still, it is a TOS item.
Now they know this, of course - which brings us back to the "why". The one further thought I had was that this multi-ID practice also makes Facebook Beacon's spiel to Advertisers - that behind every ID is a real, verified datamine of personal information - harder to play.
