What's in a name? At Facebook, just about everything...

Yes, "Null" is my real last name, and yes I've heard all the jokes.

But I've got it easy compared to Caitlin Batman, Bess Pancake, and Hiroko Yoda, all of whom found themselves blocked when they tried to create an account on the impossibly popular Facebook social network.

The Washington Post has an interesting and amusing story about how Facebook bans what must be thousands of words from being used as part of the official name of users of its service. Why can't you be Joe Christmas if you want to be? The major concern is fraud; as Facebook notes -- it is designed for "real people making real connections," not fake celebrities and Star Wars characters turning the site into a running joke filled with phony profiles. (A flood of bogus accounts was one of the major factors in the rapid decline of Facebook progenitor Friendster.)

But if you've got a legitimate yet strange name, it can take some doing to get it registered on the site. The Post outlines the measures many users must ultimately undertake, including in some cases faxing Facebook a copy of a legal ID. (I was lucky: "Null" isn't on the banned list at Facebook, though it creates endless headaches at many other sites, many of which consider it a reserved word like "admin" and simply refuse to accept it.)

But with Facebook's millions of users, plenty of clearly fake names seem to slip through the cracks. The story mentions 30 "Mojo Martinis" who've managed to register for the site, and just this morning I found myself friended by a certain "Trunks Briefs."

Now just what were his parents thinking?