Today’s strangely hypnotic timewasting widget: AIMFight. It’s stupidly simple. You type in two AOL Instant Messenger buddy names. The site then checks the population of users currently signed in to see who has been buddy-listed by the most people, out to three degrees, so you get more juice out of being listed by people who are themselves highly listed. (In other words: Are you popular with people who are popular with people who are popular?) I’ve noticed that my own score fluctuates pretty dramatically depending on when I try it, presumably because a few first-degree people who are both highly linked and not very redundantly connected to your main social network can have an enormous effect by the time you get to the 3rd-degree count. So certainly nothing to serious should be concluded from any particular snapshot. Still, as I was fiddling with it and running down the list of people I knew, a fairly clear pattern jumped out: There was a bimodal distribution, with all the straight men clustered at one peak, and the attractive outgoing women and cute gay men clustered at the other, many, many orders of magnitude higher. Duncan Watts, call your office, there’s got to be a paper or two that could be squeezed out of an analysis of these patterns…