I don’t use VKontakte, the Russian-language social network, under my own name, for the same reason I don’t use ICQ: I begrudge the time spent chatting. But! There are often things I do want to look at, and without an account you can’t get in: our online store’s group, for example, or other stores’ groups, or the awesome handmade bits and pieces we’ll soon be selling, and so on. For that I have a fake account: an invented person with someone else’s photo, swiped from Picasa, and an invented biography. Oh, and one more thing: she’s a girl :) The main benefit is that I can go in and look at whatever interests me, without the temptation to check what my friends have been up to, what mega-interesting :-) photos they’ve posted this time, and so on.