Much ado has been made about the phenomenon of fake characters on Friendster (Fakesters). Some users complain that it is an essential earmark of Friendster's emerging culture. But these icons are more than artistic expression, they serve as symbolic bridges that connect people. A bridge that is valued within a game that some that perceive is won by having the most connections. Bottom-up Social Networking Models like Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe.net and Ryze grow from strong ties to weak, and share a predominant risk of devaluing what it means to be a Friend. Iconic Ties effectively create arbitrage paths that devalue the network economy within Friendster and perhaps are not in the long-term interest of the network. A civil war has emerged between Friendster Founder Jonathan Abrams and some members of the network. Jonathan explains the need for constraining profiles within reality:

"What we're trying to do is create a filter," says Abrams, 33, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. "You don't want to go to a party or a bar where there are three million people. The whole point is to deliberately limit" the number and kind of people one individual is linked to.

Robin Dunbar and others have shown that the constraints of our cognitive capabilities limit the number of relationships we can keep track of at 150. Within the Ecoystem of Networks, this constraint guides segmentation at the Social Network level -- in contrast to the Political Network level where relationships are representational affiliations. Iconic Ties within Friendster are representational affiliations. They allow social networks to be bridged through a weak tie that anyone can subscribe to. This is good in that it accelerates network growth. But far worse because it devalues the average strength of a tie. The stronger the tie, the greater the latent potential to information to flow through it, the greater the trust between two nodes and the greater the social capital. *Activating Weak Ties* As participants in these new social networking models and users of new social networking tools, we are increasingly aware of the weak ties that surround us. Essentially, a weak tie is an option, a real option, we can exercise. Each option has a premium price for maintaining it. Each option has a latent value if exercised. danah recently reminded us that the Rule of 150 is at a given point in time, we all have ties from past places and times that can be reactivated. The further in your past, in general, the greater the cost to reactivate it. You may have search costs up front, say to find your old classmate. One of the primary value propositions of both top-down and bottom-up networking models is decreasing these search costs. Transaction costs abound, time spent in communication, for re-engaging the relationship. Social capital is risked with old ties in pursuit of building social capital anew. Historical Ties and Iconic Ties interplay as many of our old relationships rest upon semiotic foundations. Iconic Ties in Friendster are dangerously close to Avatar-initiated connections in Virtual Networks, but differ because each person doesn't present an Icon as a method of initiating connection, they are shared resources. Iconic Ties are particularly effective in Conversational Networks. Its easy to start a conversation on the basis of an icon when you consider how they work in real world context. Two mothers at a playground talking about kids, two businessmen at the Red Carpet club talking about the front page story of the WSJ, two children hailing the Pokemon shrine, two Bloggers talking about their love for Dave Winer. Iconic symbols provide a basis for affiliation. One of the primary values bottom-up networking models is decreasing the transaction cost for invoking latent ties. In Explicit or Private Networks, once you have found an old Friend, the convention of connection enables a new conduit. Iconic Ties will grow networks and reduce search costs, but once a connection is made it is less meaningful and does not significantly reduce transaction costs for invoking the latent value of a relationship.