The ever-present online popularity contest is still very much dependent on quantity and volume over quality, as we talked about last week. Fast Followers, Twitter Promoter and Magic Shovels are three examples of businesses offering Twitter followers for sale, with the latter offering up to 100,000 followers for just under $3,000. However, in a winning move for common sense, the only company taking advantage of this trend by selling Facebook ‘friends’ has been stopped by a cease and desist notice from the social network.

The company in question, uSocial, has agreed to stop selling groups of Facebook fans to clients after an investigation found that the company had broken several laws, including illegally accessing the site. Unfortunately, the victory isn’t really the end of the story, as though uSocial must stop selling ‘friends’, it will continue to sell ‘fans’ to business users.

“We are well within our legal right to do so and despite the C&D, we’re not taking the service down,” said Leon Hill, CEO of uSocial. This is not his first run-in with a social network, as last year he was given a letter by bookmarking site Digg asking him to stop selling ‘hits’ that would make a news item appear on the site’s front page.

Selling followers on social networking sites is now a well-known practice and the companies within this space play on users’ desire for large numbers of friends, which is often used as a metric to determine a user’s popularity and influence.

Though this practice isn’t really hurting anyone, it’s still creating a sense of trust in those with a large ‘following’ for all the wrong reasons. Though we’d like to think most businesses will stay away from this kind of service, it’s probably those with slightly shady business practices that would be happy to pay for an immediate increase in credibility – and shouldn’t be relied upon at all.