There once was a friendly and beautiful girl named Aretha Millsaps, whose only flaw was that she didn't exist. Also, that she only existed to promote a commercial website link on her Facebook profile, but then you probably guessed that by now. Late last December, she sent a friend request to me, and while I'm usually inclined to accept requests from Facebook users who have mutual friends (and most don't even come with a personal message), Ms. Millsaps and I seemed to have nothing in common but those friends. So I kept her friend request in queue, and waited to see what happened.

By the time 2011 ended, Aretha and I had 7 mutual friends; by the first week of 2012, 11 mutual friends. Toward the middle of January, 14 mutual friends. Sometime after that, someone flagged her account, and Aretha Millsaps' life on Facebook was no more. But here is the curious thing: By then, over a dozen actual friends and acquaintances had friended her. More curious still: While many men are inclined to blindly accept any invitation with a curvy hot woman attached to it, roughly half of Aretha Millsaps' friends were women.

As it turns out, this phenomenon is fairly common on Facebook: A team of University of British Columbia researchers created a social network of bots on Facebook, and were able to get 3,055 of 8,570 friend requests on Facebook accepted. At first, only 20% of these bot requests were accepted, but once a bot gained a friend, subsequent acceptances by people in the acceptor's network increased to 60 percent.

Where is this going? With the imminent IPO of Facebook, and growing interest and investment in the network, it's easy to see a rise of bots: