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AIM Fights
AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) has developed a plaything that allows you to keep tabs on just how popular you are within the AIM network. Even better, you can compare yourself against someone else and see which one of you is more popular. This non-utilitarian but still amusing activity is called AIM Fight. It even comes with its own website, aimfight.com. On the site, you can type in your screen name and the screen of your friend, archenemy, or whoever you want to “fight” against and in a matter of seconds, the site generates both of your popularity levels and declares the winner.
AIM fights work by calculating how many people who are currently online have listed you as their buddy. Also included are buddies up to three degrees away. Sounds kind of complicated so let me explain it this way. A has listed you as a buddy. B, C, and D have listed A as their buddy. In turn, 30 people have listed B, C, and D as their buddies. Your total popularity score will include A, B, C, D, and the 30 people. Thus is the three-degrees-away clause. So basically, your score will be higher if someone who's highly popular has added you as a buddy. Sounds a lot like real life doesn't it?
By the way, your score in AIM fights is not affected by the number of people you add as buddies. The key to increasing your popularity is to somehow persuade people to add you on their buddy list and have those people added on other people's buddy lists and so on to the third degree. If you happen to be popular enough to belong in the top five percent of all AIM users, your rank is shown compared with the rest of the five percent. If you're not in elite five percent though, only your score is given on the AIM fights results.