I knew it. I knew that all these recent “friend requests” on Facebook from people I completely don’t know are bogus. I received two requests within a couple of weeks from women I don’t know and have no common friends with. I then received another request from an Agent person in New York that has over 600 contacts. The latter may be a legitimate person who is simply trying to build up his network similar to what recruiters have been doing on LinkedIn.

I was very suspect about the first two requests which I have ignored (a Facebook option). Now comes word that these requests could be from people trying to create fake profiles so that they could sell them on EBay. As reported by an article in ValleyWag yesterday an EBay user is trying to sell 10 fake profiles from Facebook each containing 200+ friends. See the full story: http://valleywag.com/5015883/facebook-profiles-for-sale-on-ebay

It looks like the items have since been pulled off of EBay. Did Facebook contact EBay and have the items removed? Did the person who created the items simply get a mass amount of negative feedback and remove the items? How many other people are out there doing the same thing and building up a Spam database that they can sell to others without even selling the actual Profile?

I was looking around Plaxo the other day and stumbled upon some new features that I hadn’t seen before. These are features that were newly added with the launch (beta) of Plaxo 3.0. You can read the full details on their Blog post “Introducing an All-New Plaxo”.

The functionality that I thought was a nice touch was the extended list of sync points that you can now connect with. I found them while browsing through the online calendar section (see picture below).

Apparently, you can now do some basic synchronizing with your cell phone without paying any monthly fee. Before you had to use their paid service for any cell phone connectivity.

Plaxo has been my favorite tool since it’s early days. I’ve had all my computers connected to Plaxo to keep my contact list and calendar up to date. I’ve also enjoyed getting automatic updates from friends and family who are on Plaxo without having to read emails from them containing their new contact information or updates.

The Plaxo Pulse is another feature that I’ve been using for a while. But lately with all the new features (groups, feeds, etc) it’s starting to get a bit noisy. I’ll have to start filtering down the amount of information being sent to my Pulse stream. There are also some redundancy in functionality between Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sources but still a nice application.

There are a number of feeds you can aggregate into your Pulse stream. I’ve only bothered to hook in Facebook and LinkedIn so far. There are plenty of others you can hook in to get all your notices in one location.