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I just signed up for a MySpace page. I’ve become very interested in social networking and it was time to join the fun. Once you create an account the next step is to add some friends to your network. So the first thing I decided to do was send an invite my friend Bill Gates. (Now I don’t expect you to believe that Bill Gates and I are friends. I admit that I’ve never met the man, but I'm trying to make a bigger point, so bear with me.)

A quick search on MySpace for Bill or William Gates returned 192 pages of search results. They couldn’t all be my Bill. I narrowed my search. I know what Bill looks like, so I searched just for profiles that contained a picture. I gave up after finding over a 100 profiles with a picture of Bill Gates and I had only reviewed half the profile pictures. I will say that the number of profiles with Bill in a sweater were about even with those of him in a suit. Only a few choose to drag up that old mug shot of him from his teenage years.

Being Bill’s imaginary friend I know a lot about him. For instance, he lives in Seattle. So I narrowed my profile search to those with a picture and that live in Seattle. I was down to 21 profiles. I also guessed that the real Bill Gates would know how old he was. There are limits to my imaginary friendship. I used Wikipedia to figure that out - 52. Throwing out everyone that wasn’t smart enough to check Bill’s bio in Wikipedia to get the right age, I got the number down to 17.

Here I became stuck. There was just no way to narrow down any further without reviewing each profile and making a guess. And yes, I’m thinking the same thing you are; none of them were actually created by Bill Gates. They say that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. On MySpace no one knows if you’re Bill Gates. Or if you’re not.

This type of profile-squatting is a problem with social networks. In many cases it’s clearly harmless fun. But if it’s being used to try and fool people or profit from someone’s celebrity it’s clearly a problem. Even worse, is if a phony profile is being used to slander someone’s reputation or to gain trust with someone only to bully or betray them.

Recently I read with great interest that MySpace reached an agreement with 49 state attorneys general to help organize an industry task force to solve the problem of verifying identities and ages of people on social networks. Symantec has been asked to participate in the task force and we're looking forward to our involvement. It won’t turn Bill Gates into a friend of mine. But it will make social networks a better place.