I got an email from Barclaycard recently entitled ‘Your holiday edition of Contactless Living’. Despite the fact I barely use my Barclaycard – I only signed up to consolidate my existing debts into one monthly interest free payment – my immediate reaction was that somehow they knew a lot more about my current social life than I really wanted them to.
A quick click and I discovered that it was actually a digital magazine about those new credit and debit cards that you merely have to wave in the general direction of a machine to buy things, rather than going through all that pointless rigmarole of secret pin numbers and authorisation.
Nevertheless, I do sometimes worry about my lack of friends in the real and digital worlds. I have about 70 friends now on Facebook, some of whom don’t count (sorry, mum). To be fair, that’s balanced out by those who resolutely and persistently refuse to participate whether through a lack of time, a lack of interest or a lack of even basic technical knowhow. So 70 is probably about right, and in many ways 70 seems a healthy number of friends to have.
But some friends, who on the surface have led broadly similar lives to my own, seem nonetheless to know hundreds upon hundreds of people. Where they found the time to meet all these folk and how come they all were willing Facebook users I can’t for the life of me fathom. Let’s rephrase that; until a few days ago I couldn’t fathom it. Perhaps I now have the answer.
Because it seems you can buy Facebook friends. If you don’t believe me, put the phrase into Google. Admittedly this service is mainly aimed at small businesses in order to falsely boost their company profile and thus, so the theory goes, push them up to the top on a Google search. But it can also be used to make you as a person seem a lot more popular than you actually are.
Try this site, for example, aimed at American students. It appears you can buy 500 friends for just $17. I’ll save you the maths and exchange rates, that’s just over 2p a friend. Not even I can be bought for that little.
You need to be careful which site you use, though, because many will provide you with hundreds of new friends with Filipino or Bangladeshi names, something that may be less than convincing if you haven’t travelled further than Birmingham in the last 6 months.
