I gave this argument differents thoughts, not only having different accounts violates Facebook's TOS but Zuckerberg states it is "immoral" to have more than one account so people should be ashamed of it. I can understand his position, he has to enforce the fact that every active user on Facebook is a real user.

Now, let's rule out developers that until lately were forced into this behaviour, there's plenty of people out there using multiple accounts. Plenty of people using multiple accounts on daily basis. For example people running businesses/marketing with their account instead of page and much more importantly you know who's using more than one account? Casual gamers, those who play games on daily basis. Every Zynga game (just to point out the most successful ones) is a spam factory forcing users to spam in order to advance in their games, users are aware of this and start their "gaming" accounts. If you didn't think about this yet, just try and check how many people descend from the "Games" family (and that's only for english speaking countries) these days, impressive growth. Now check the "Cityville", the "Farm*" family and so on.

And there's plenty of other categories.

Once I read that Madrid had two times as many accounts on Facebook as the real city population. Now you could point out we don't know how many of this users are counted as active, of course Facebook will never point out the number and will always defend its strenght, but that's something people should think about.

businesses that advertise on facebook are pretty much forced into using more than one account as well

I have 200+ accounts, from when I was first learning how to program and was automating some tedious mutlplayer strategies in a text-based facebook MMO game. Was a fun way to learn!

The game was called Warbook, and I believe the creator is on HN (hi TJ!), and doing some YC gaming company.

Wow I almost forgot about this game, I just checked and it doesn't seem to work anymore. I also wrote a bot to play 50+ accounts for me, mainly to generate gold and sell them. I made about 2k USD via paypal, and my programming was so much better after that.

Nice. I had $5k worth of gold for when it was selling for $10/billion, but then the price crashed since I was slow and supply had gone up while I had stopped playing. Oh well.

Yeah most of my gold was sold @ $2/billion. Another way to make money was to help people train their accounts to level 50, this took like 20-30 minutes for 2 accounts, easy money.

Here is a plot of the results: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/facebook/data.png

(Currently updated every hour; I will fade out updating as time passes.)

Wow. That means that FB doesn't have 600 million users but 20-30% less. It always bothered me that they pretend that every account equals a unique user. Good IPO luck.

This is a sample largely consisting of web developers, and people who know that you can have more than one account. That conclusion doesn't follow, in my opinion.

HN is a sampling of about 0.01% the size of Facebook. There's absolutely no way you can make the argument that they have only 20% the users they claim.

I think you mean "That could mean that FB..."

There's less than a thousand respondents in this HN poll, and HN isn't likely a representative sample of FB users.

Great idea :).

Labels on horizontal axis need fixing though (eg. 6-10, not 6).

Overzealous cropping to avoid the long text after the 0; fixed - thanks!

I have one real, and one fake. The fake one is to find out what applications do before they can do it to my friends.

Do you find Facebook applications have enough value to warrant this? I just don't use them. But maybe I'm missing out.

Day to day, I'm not even sure that Facebook has enough value, much less the applications.

This is brilliant. I have a fake one for no particular reason, and also with no friends, but I think I will start using it for this reason alone.

For information gathering I have a second facebook account. Initially this account was created to gain access to apps - without giving up "my" data. This totally invented persona, with name, gender and now even pictures (all in which a face can't be discerned) has somewhere around 350+ friends. A lot more friends than my real account.

With this account I befriend people I want to know more about without them knowing of it. People I've met in a bar, co-workers, gatherings and what not. And by "befriend" I mean sending friend requests.

It is surprisingly easy to befriend people on facebook and more so to circumvent their set "privacy" settings. In many cases all that's required for full access to someones profile/wall and data is simply to befriend a friend of them. One way to do it is to try and befriend as many "friend of friends" as possible - that way when they receive a friend request they see "you have 12 friends in common" and in those scenarios most just simply accept.

What more is that I've created several "pages" with this account and some have well over 1,000 members. As an experiment I created a couple of pages about non-causes. For instance "Do not change X" where X is something I just made up where there really is no concern for change anyways. For instance "Do not raise minimum purchase age of alcohol to 21!" (in this country that age is below 20 and there's nothing actually saying it's gonna change). Many likes.

This is scary. What I have been able to do with facebook is scary. That is also why I am extremely conservative with my own, real, account and usage.

I've only ever had one account. But just today I saw a friend suggestion to friend an account, which I could recognize for what it was by being able to read Chinese, for the pet dog of my niece in Taiwan. I've seen more than a few other accounts that at the very least don't use the actual real-world name of the account holder. Many married women with children who have been online since the 1990s take great care not to use their real names, or at least their real photographs, online.

If you're developing Facebook apps or using Facebook authentication, you pretty much have to have two or more Facebook accounts. The problem is that having more than one account is against Facebook's terms of service, and they don't provide a developer sandbox.

It's advised to create test accounts through the Facebook API: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/

You can create test accounts through the API. I actually have a terminal script where I just write "fox" and it opens up a new Firefox profile with a new Facebook test user in it.

Care posting or giving a bit more insight?

You can open Firefox on Mac OS X with a certain profile with a command line like:

open -n /Applications/Firefox.app --args -P some_profile -no-remote http://localhost:9011/test_user

The URL is on my dev server, it creates a Facebook test user and then redirects to it. First you get an access token from graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token, then you use https://graph.facebook.com/APP_ID/accounts/test-users to create an account using the token you just got.

Does it count as an account if the only reason I created it is to keep others from creating one in my name? Mine just says "I don't use FB. Email me, instead."

If you can't be bothered to reach me outside of FB, then you don't care enough about either the subject matter or me.

I think it should, yeah. Because it is probably filled with sh*t about you that your friends have posted. Like pictures in which you where tagged.

One that I only log into about once a month when I want to look at someone else's page from a search result. I feel a bit guilty about not keeping in contact with my friends more often, but Facebook just looks like such a dreadful time sink.

I've got roughly the same use patterns as you, and if it weren't for the one or two regular events that I attend that are organized on Facebook, I'd probably delete my account. And yes, it is a dreadful time sink. That's why after the first flush I scaled back to around once a month.

I have created more than 10 to help a friend on Farmville :) plus my personal one.

Should this total include ones we've bought in bulk?

I used to have one, then I deleted it.

How many HN accounts do you have?

You should start a poll with this.

I have one, and I use groups to keep business and personal posts separated. I also have a "limited profile" group for people I only sort-of know (surprised more people don't do this).

"As more and more companies rely on Facebook for identity and single sign on, understanding the true reach of Facebook and how many users you're losing by only supporting Facebook connect, becomes important."

It sounds like poor understanding of a core marketing aspect there: Knowing the demographics. Unless you are trying to rely on Facebook Connect with the HN audience though?

1 real, 1 fake for testing, 2 kids under 13 = 4

I have one account for myself.

I also manage one for my baby boy, so that I can keep baby pictures all tagged and organized in one place. I don't consider this to be my account, I consider it his.

This points out an ambiguity in voting. If you register an account for your kids, should you count it?

I have one, but I was thinking about creating a second one for the strong AI I dream to create, after I create it :).

I have a personal one I rarely use and one for logging in to just look at something behind the sign in linked from HN or reddit.

I might go there to message someone I fell out of contact with but I deactivate my account instead of logging out. So I have 2 but don't really use either of them.

Shouldn't everyone's answer be 1 since more than that is in violation of FB's TOS :)

Not only that, it's easy for them to enforce that. When I recently tried to create an account (from Germany) Facebook required me to enter a mobile phone number. It wouldn't let me create an account without. So you effectively you need a mobile phone number for every account.

Just use prepaid SIM cards to verify as many accounts you like.

It is again FB's TOS to have 0 accounts now? Wow. :-P

1 personal (rarely used), 1 fake for random staff on internets and whole bunch i created along the way on projects/gigs/jobs

Why the heck would ANYONE have multiple accounts? Doesn't that even violate the TOS? :S

1, and even that is too many.

why do you need more than 1?

0

1 and it's fake. I'm not sure what you'll get out of this poll. Most people will create an account simply because some site requires it and then completely forget about it.

I have a pretty vast personal list of reasons why I do not, and shall not ever, have a facebook account.

Other than the most blatantly obvious and mundane reasons to have a facebook account - I would like to seriously hear why one should have one. The obvious being "I keep in touch with my friends" -- well, I keep in touch with my friends - most of whom have an account. Our relationships have never suffered from my not having an account.

I find the more insidious motives behind facebook and its founder to be hands down a showstopper from my perspective.

So, other than the ambiguous "keeping in touch/sharing photos" with friends, what would be a compelling reason to have an account.

The "everybody else has one" is rather flimsy.

1