I touched on FakeYourSpace (warning: content is not really worksafe!) in a previous post on marketers jumping into social networking sites as a different approach to enlisting communities in the sales cycle, but I just have to write a little bit more about it. It’s just so hilarious, I mean think about it for a second -you build a page on MySpace, FaceBook or ConsuMating (the latter of which I don’t know but sounds, well, just as bad!) and then buy a friend from FakeYourSpace who posts a few comments every week on your page. With the objective to draw in real people, curious about how a lamo like you gets to hang with models, and decide to ’show some love’ and add you as a friend, hoping that will get them closer to your fake friends. From their site:

An exciting new service allows users of MySpace and Facebook to purchase hot models as friends for only 99 cents a month.  For only 99 cents you receive 2 customized messages per week, totaling 8 per month.  Fake Your Space offers all different kinds of ethnicities, sexual preferences, and body types.  Feel free to browse our Men and Women and pick the ones you like.  By purchasing multiple models you will be multiplying the number of comments and friends you have.  It’s that easy!

Wow, I mean, just like a big freakin’ wow 2.0, dude. It’s everything from sad to obnoxious, but it is ingenious at the same time. I love it.

Mashable has a post up on it too now, and they put it like this:

That said, popularity is the currency of social sites: it doesn’t matter if you don’t know any of your 10,000+ friends, so long as you have more connections than everyone else. As a result, marketplaces are bound to emerge around getting more friends: there are hundreds of sites where MySpace users can submit their friend IDs to receive friend requests from thousands of random strangers. However, it’s debatable whether any of these sites are used by real people, or just marketers trying to pimp their wares through fake profiles. FakeYourSpace, meanwhile, is amusing but unlikely to amount to much.

Very true. The most enticing bit of course, if you’re into sociology, is that these social networking sites are more and more becoming market places, where you are the product, and indeed popularity is the currency. So, like a company advertising a product and generating interest, so too now consumers are starting to turn themselves into products on these sites, and using flashy widgets and now ‘friends’ to jumpstart their business. As someone who worked to get a community started by heavily posting in our site’s forums under different user names (years ago, and go on, admit you’ve done it too!), it’s cool to see this has trickled down sofar now that everyday people consider it an option to jumpstart their quest for popularity with the aid of some rented friends.

So, kudos to the person(s) at FakeYourSpace -and please let’s all hope they use their company blog to make us all laugh with the creative process in finding new shoutouts and which ‘friends’ are the most popular!