FriendsForSale - Facebook Addiction Again

April 1st, 2008 | Odd Ends, social media, social networking

FriendsOnSale First there was Scrabulous, more recently Packrat, and now? FriendsForSale. You read the right, Friends For Sale. Go figure that would be popular. What it amounts to is you can ‘purchase’ your friends for game dollars.

Each of your friends that’s never been purchased starts out at the same price. As a person’s persona is purchased, the value goes up. The increments are fairly small at first, but quickly escalate.

Purchasing a person is not a straight buy either. There is a markup factor as well as profit for the current owner. Also, the person being purchased receives a little bit of game cash. This results in those being purchased frequently acquiring a good bit more cash than those that receive few or no purchases. Purchases can be made of unowned personas as well as those owned by others.

Basic play aside there are a couple of camps of folks involved in this game. Those that see it as demeaning, and those that just see it as fun. The demeaning side can be seen in how a person is bought and sold, as some would say, like a piece of garbage sale junk. Even others in that camp just see the game as another way to feed on the cliques and elitism they see happening in social networks and social media across the board.

On the flip side, those just in it for the fun do have a few interesting takes on it. Some treat it like a trading card game, with each trade being more like stealing away someones best rookie card. Some take the fun into more risque things, playing up on the innuendo of ‘owning’ someone. And of course there’s the crowd that just finds it another cute game to play with friends.

The truth, in my opinion, is that neither side is all the way wrong. Elitism is hard at play in this game in a way, but more of elitist worship. It’s the groupie effect. Persons like Robert Scoble and Jeff Pulver bring the most cash for purchase. Yet ostensibly, neither plays the game themselves. But because of hero worship, the one who owns becomes envied. Now is this all bad? Not really, it’s definitely a parallel to collecting trading cards.

Trading cards have value based on how famous the player on the card is, and how hard the card is to get a copy of, and finally, what sentimental value there is. Friends For Sale’s economy behaves the same way essentially, with social media rockstars being generally the most valued cards as it were. However, like in trading card collection, there are a wealth of those collecting their personal friends over the rockstars.

Unlike in collecting trading cards though, there’s one big difference. Any player can buy your cards right out from under you in FriendsForSale. All they need is enough game dollars. This can make the game frustrating to participate in, especially when you play with your friends.

My thoughts on it? If you have time to play more games, this one is a low involvement game, with no clear winners or losers, and the game bucks are free every 4 hours. There are definitely worse games and applications on Facebook.

If you don’t have time for more Facebook games, why the heck did you read this far?

Go, buy your friends, and steal my cards. I dare you!