Pretendster (2003)
with Fake I.D.
HTML, PHP, Flash

(Written March 26, 2004)

Introduction

Pretendster subverts Friendster by inserting convincingly real randomly generated individuals into the Friendster network, attaching them to real participants in the network and giving them the power to generate artificial testimonials, respond to messages, and make new friends. The largely homogenous Friendster population has allowed for the easy generation of convincing personalities via a database of hipster ephemera.

Pretendster also seeks to break down the arbitrary barriers erected to make Friendster "dating friendly" by using Pretendsters inserted into the Friendster network as gateways, connecting unconnected groups of individuals.

The audience for Pretendster is largely made up of pranksters and social critics who share our concerns about social networking sites on the Internet. As of mid-March, 6,210 Pretendster users have inserted 14,128 personalities ("Pretendsters") into the Friendster network. These Pretendsters have generated 8,442 artificial testimonials. More than 6,500 messages have been sent to Pretendsters, many by individuals convinced that the Pretendsters are part of Friendster’s homogenous population.

Stories about Pretendsters abound. Individuals have used Pretendsters to create online soap operas, to toy with inappropriately aggressive online suitors, to supplement their pool of friends ("keep up with the Joneses"), or even as online alter egos, assuming the randomly generated personalities as their own.

The profile infiltrator allows Friendster users access to individuals outside their network of friends. A spider crawling the Friendster network using Pretendsters as gateways has collected the names and pictures of over 2 million individuals, including infamous Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, and allows access to each of these individual’s profiles and friend networks.

The PHP code and MySQL database schema for Pretendster have been released as open source with the hope that others will use them to question the current state of social networking sites.

Background

The Pretendster site was created in the summer of 2003 as a reaction to popular networking site "Friendster." At the time, Friendster was attracting a large population of Internet-savvy hipsters with its friend management and friend creation offerings. After receiving a barrage of e-mails encouraging us to join the site, we signed up to see what the hoopla was about.

We became fascinated with the mapping of interpersonal relationships, obsessed with discovering the different ways we knew person "X" within the Friendster network. It became quickly apparent that there were limits to the allowed degrees of separation. This restriction was annoyingly arbitrary: we didn’t necessarily have more in common with a friend of a friend than a friend five times removed. The only fathomable justification for this restriction was that it was designed to put at ease those using the site to develop new relationships.

As we continued to explore, we uncovered a large number of artificial personas (Evil, Harry Potter, et al.). It is well known that Friendster has systematically deleted the accounts of phony members. The reason for this was divulged in interviews with the man behind Friendster, Jonathan Abrams. Mr. Abrams initially conceived of the site as a way for lonely Silicon Valley men to meet women. Unfortunately, he has been so single-minded in his vision that he has stifled a number of innovative uses for the site. For a brief moment, Friendster became a valuable resource for non-profit organizations seeking to rally members and connect with other organizations of similar mindset. Under Mr. Abrams there is no room for such a radical use of Friendster technology.

We found ourselves particularly distressed by Friendster’s "testimonials" feature, which allowed friends to leave public comments about one another, subject to the approval of the person receiving the testimonial. This encouraged the "collection" of friends, creating an ad hoc social hierarchy based on the quality and quantity of one’s testimonials. The cooler kids were clearly those with more testimonials, regardless of whether or not they actually knew the individuals leaving them. This drive to accumulate false adoration has clearly led to the homogeneity of the Friendster population. In an effort to appear "cool" and testimonial-worthy many individuals have adopted a common library of favorite books, TV shows, and so forth.

Our Friendster experiences left us frustrated and disturbed: frustrated at the retrictions the site’s creator has placed on the technology, disturbed at the online personas Friendster users were adopting in an effort to compete for popularity. Given Friendster’s importance vis-à-vis the cultural development of the Internet, we were impelled to create Pretendster.

Execution

The heart of the Pretendster project is the Pretendster generator and manager. The generator allows individuals to generate artificial personas (much like characters in a role-playing game) using a database of names, books, movies, and other trivia gathered from relationship and social networking Web sites. Once an acceptable Pretendster has been generated it can be automatically registered on Friendster and connected to a random number of other Pretendsters.

Upon registration a Pretendster becomes a Friendster friend of its creator and can be managed via the Pretendster manager. Through the manager an individual can log in to Friendster as one of his or her Pretendsters and read messages sent to the Pretendster, view testimonials left for the Pretendster or review friend requests from other Friendster users. While logged in an individual can effectively become one of his or her Pretendsters, corresponding with other Friendster users, leaving testimonials, and adding friends.

The manager also allows individuals to "kill" their Pretendsters, deregistering them from Friendster. The kill function can also be used to disassociate a Pretendster from the Pretendster system without deleting it from Friendster.

Finally, the manager allows an individual to have their Pretendster generate a Friendster testimonial customized with their name. Testimonials were handpicked from relationship and networking Web sites.

Each Pretendster is registered on Friendster with a unique e-mail address. Notification e-mail messages sent to Pretendsters by Friendster are forwarded by the Pretendster system to their creator, affording Pretendster users the opportunity to manage their Pretendsters without having to monitor their accounts every day.

Those who have created a Pretendster may use the profile infiltrator. The profile infiltrator subverts the notion of Friendster as a collection of private gated networks by using Pretendsters as a gateway connecting groups of friends. The Pretendster spider actively crawls the Friendster network creating a large connected graph of the Friendster population. Individuals can explore the spidered Friendster network, viewing pictures, profiles and friend networks normally hidden behind Friendster’s limitation on degrees of separation.

  • Exhibited
  • July 2004, Packet, New Langton Arts, San Francisco