Dealing With Fraudulent Identities
Sooner or later most of the large social networking sites are going to come to the sad realization that they grew too fast. As Facebook actively develops a new data center one has to stop and wonder how much useless information they are storing on their servers. And I’m not talking about drunk photos and meaningless 3:00am status updates, as the problem stems a bit further than that, into the “grey” zone of internet identities.
Facebook's New Data Center in Prineville, OR
Let’s use my ten year old brother, Mark, as an example. Over the last few days he has become fascinated by VoIP, downloading Skype and registering no less than 5 accounts. Who is to stop someone from creating multiple internet identities? No one. I personally have created quite a few Twitter accounts (more than ten last time I counted).
With thousands of fake profiles created on a daily basis, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and other services are unnecessarily forced to scale and waste resources maintaing these bogus profiles. What amazes me even more is that these services aren’t actively protecting themselves against this sort of fraud.
In all fairness, Facebook used to force you into using a university email address (not anymore). Gmail also required you to provide a cellular number when registering (not anymore). Twitter recently announced that they will be deleting accounts that have not shown any activity within the last 6 months (though they haven’t yet to implemented this strategy).
From the surface it seems as though these companies are more concerned about user growth than profitability. This business model is not perfect though, as fake profiles = wasted resources that could have been used towards improving the service itself. The problem is just beginning. How many more data centers will Facebook need to build before they realize that a real problem is on their hands? I hope they soon take note and worry less about attaining “millions more” users and instead focus more attention on their active user base. As any entrepreneur will tell you, 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your revenue. Focus on keeping those 20% happy, as they are the ones keeping you afloat.
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