Perhaps you’ve heard that Apple and Facebook are having a little bit of an issue at the moment. Despite launching with Facebook Connect integration yesterday, it’s now nowhere to be seen on Apple’s new music social network, Ping. And that’s too bad because even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed up to try out Ping yesterday, we hear.
While Facebook Connect will no longer help you find Zuckerberg there, if you do a simple name search, there he is. Well actually, there he is twice. Hmm. Which one to choose?
One has 46 followers, says he’s into “Dance, Hip-hop/Rap”, and has no picture. The other has 74 followers, doesn’t list musical preferences, but has a picture. So it’s gotta be the second one, right?
Nope. As tempting as it is to think that Zuckerberg actually filled in his profile to say “It’s true, I invented Facebook,” this is a fake account. The one with no picture and less followers? That’s the real Zuck. He follows two people, Katy Perry and Bret Taylor. One of those is a famous pop singer, the other is Facebook’s CTO. I’ll let you sort that out.
Who cares? Well, it’s sort of interesting that anyone can create a fake account of someone else on Ping. Sure, you need an iTunes account, but there are undoubtedly many people who have no interest in using Ping and are happy to create fake accounts aplenty. As another example, here’s The Beatles. No, it’s not the group (iTunes doesn’t play nicely with them, remember?) — it’s someone who made their name “The” and “Beatles” and put an album cover picture in there.
These fake account could potentially lead to users who believe them getting tricked into making purchases that they think their idols recommend. Zuckerberg didn’t actually recommend Those Darlins, for example — Fake Zuckerberg did.
Seems like there’s an identification system that could potentially help with this. Oh yeah, Facebook Connect.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
iTunes, Apple’s digital media player application, was introduced in January 2001. The application allows you to organize and play your digital music and podcast files. iTunes is available as a free download for Mac OS X and Windows. iTunes is able to interface on the iPod digital media player and on Apple’s mobile device, the iPhone
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
