Step right up, buy a few friends or fans at the low low price of 20 cents. Or buy in bulk and get 5000 buds for only 13 cents apiece. This is the offer of uSocial.net of Brisbane, Australia.

Leon Hill, its founder, came up with the idea after getting booted out of Digg for an appalling venture. On Digg.com USocial was asking just under $100 to vote 100 times for a client’s chosen story. If a client wanted 1000 votes they paid $700. Though Hill’s claim for dropping out of Digg “site” a few months later was more clients than he could handle, the more likely scenario is as Digg claimed: They ordered him to stop.

Now USocial faces the same restraint from Facebook executives. While Hill told Associated Press that the USocial practice of manually logging in to a client’s profile or creating one,  and seeking out people who are a good fit for the client’s products or services without saying it’s not the client is not violating any Facebook terms of service, Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt disagreed.  ”Buying and selling of actions that are supposed to be taken by a user are certainly, we would argue, not authentic,” he told AP.  Now Facebook is saying that anyone caught sharing her or his password with a third party could have her account shut down.

While USocial’s Digg practice of selling votes was unethical, we’re not sure who is acting the least appropriately in this “Friends and Fans Fiasco” – Facebook or USocial. This could simply be seen as hiring a contractor to handle your profile, just as book have ghostwriters, for example. Do OnStar’s outsourcers answer the phone “OnStar” or “Sitel, outsourcer for OnStar?” And do we care?

Facebook has little right to say with whom you can share your password. Just as with the recent high-handed LinkedIn “limit your connections to 30,000″ decision, one must wonder if Facebook is considering its profilers or its wallet.

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