Unemployed HTML coders, take heart: gullible Venture Capitalists can again be tapped for cash to bring implausible business plans into life.

The phenomenal popularity of the Friendster (http://www.friendster.com) social network where people meet online friends has prompted Silicon Valley fund managers to give the Bright Young Things another chance. Some 1.8 million identities - many of them fictional - haunt the Friendster network.

Friendster received $1m in private equity from three investors including the co-founder of PayPal earlier this month, and Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark have apparently coughed up $10 million more.

But why is that founders of social networks often seem to be the most anti-social people in the industry, as this delicious feature story (http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2003-08-13/feature.html/1/index.html) in SF Weekly describes. The snarling founder of Friendster, Jonathan Abrams isn't a weblogger, but he has all the characteristics of a blog-bore: he can't stand criticism, and he can't get a date.

His policy of deleting fictional identities has riled his creative users so much that it's spawned a neologism - Fakester. Fakesters have their own manifesto (http://fakesters.netfirms.com/), and the Fakesters even held a protest event in San Francisco at an appearance by Abrams at a Commonwealth Club 'Urban Singles' night earlier this month.

Abrams doesn't just hate Fakesters using Friendster because it makes his link-maps so dense (for example, everyone wants to link to 'God', or 'San Francisco'). He makes money by the degrees of separation between users: and users quite quickly realise they don't need a Dweeb sitting in the centre of this network, playing match-maker.

There's certainly a modest business model to be made from such software: British site Friends Reunited (http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk) is the classic example of a social phenomenon that has successfully supported a mom n'pop operation (albeit by now a bloody rich mum and dad). The wonderful Hot Or Not (http://www.hotornot.com) also shows a simple idea can prosper, if it's good enough. ®