It's now not enough to be uber-popular with the cool crowd in real life; you need to be in there in the virtual world of slightly-geeky social networking too. Those with MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and other pointless profiles will be aware of the concept of friends (those who don't have such accounts may also have heard of them to be fair, but perhaps in a slightly different context). For many people your profile friends exist to make you look cool. Who doesn't want to see "You have 10000 friends" every time you log onto such a site to check your spam?

Not that MySpace people are notoriously choosy anyway, but for those who are so inept that they can't get anyone except Tom - the default friend for all new and lonely people - to be their "friend" but feel excess friends in the online world will make you look elite, pump up your ego and get you hot chicks for some reason, you've just missed out on a service to fulfil all your dreams.

Whilst doing the daily surfing for money-making schemes that would result in a life of leisure without sacrificing financial well-being, the Poorhouse chanced upon fakeyourspace.com.

Fakeyourspace offered you a catalogue of "hot" friends - by which was meant anyone looking like a model rather than a real person - divided up by gender. No pointless details of interests, lifestyles, deep and meaningful politics or anything necessary, just point and click at your dream guy/gal and they will become your "friends". For a price. The service cost $0.99 per month per friend, and not only would have a catalogue of presumably yet-to-make-it models on your friends list but they would leave a couple of messages (of your choice) on your comments page each week. If you were especially desperate you could by the same friend twice and they would leave double the messages.

Think this is ridiculous? Infoworld repeats a testimony - which couldn't possibly be a lie of course - that used to be on fakeyourspace.com. "FakeYourSpace changed my online life. I have never been so popular!" said "Lindsay", an amazing mere 2 days after the site was even started.

The Poorhouse apologises for getting your rich-but-friendless hopes up; the reason most of this is written in the past tense is that the service, whilst apparently doing rather well and gaining 50,000 hits per day, has been shut down, due to "legal problems". These legal problems seem to be based on the fact that the images of the "friends", were taken from istockphoto.com, a well-known site for obtain stock photography (as you could probably guess from its name). Part of the terms and conditions for using istockphoto stuff include that you can't use the photos in such a way that would lead other people to "think that the model endorses" anything, including yourself. Oops. The site was supposed to back running as soon as new model pictures which could be used in such a way were found, but nothing new has appeared at their address at present.

Nonetheless if you're absolutely desperate for that sort of thing, you could probably do worse than trawl ebay. Here's an auction for a girl who will be your myspace girlfriend no less for a month. She'll let you be #1 in her top 8 friends and write any comments, messages and bulletins you choose to you every day - but as she probably wisely goes to some lengths to say, no actual real-life sex. Despite that, this service was worth real money to at least 6 people, with the final bid price being $10.50.

Check her profile here, if you can tolerate the spam overload. At least fakeyourspace's fake friends had their profiles set to private so you could only assume they were fakes rather than have it shoved in your face.

In the slightly more real world of everyday life, similar services exist oriented towards your mobile phone. Take mobilealibi.com. Here you can register and for some small amount of money they will fake-call your phone number at any given time of day you choose. You'd think this would be rather irritating, but no, apparently it has a use for some weirdos.

... it is no longer satisfactory just to own the most recent mobile phone – you have to be seen using it in order to demonstrate your importance and status.If you’re not engaged on your mobile phone regularly, those around you conclude that no one is depends on you – professionally or socially. Is that what you want?

Erm, no. I'd rather have hundreds of robots ring me up 10 times an hour every day of course.

In other ridiculous yet profitable money-making scheme news, there is now a service that for $10 will create you a "Mii" - the virtual cartoon character that you use to play games on the Nintendo Wii. Send them a photo, wait a bit, and something supposedly resembling you will be sent back to your games machine, or if you're unlucky enough not to have one you can receive it as an equally pointless jpeg picture if you so wish. Do they do a good job in their art imitating life? Judge for yourself.