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"Joe McDonald died in 1971. This morning on Facebook, he died again. \nFacebook disabled the profiles of McDonald and his girlfriend Leola Lewis Wednesday morning, according to Donnelyn Curtis, the University of Nevada librarian who set the profiles up as a way to engage students in learning about history. \n\"I was a little angry that I didn't get any warning,\" Curtis told Mashable. \"I think that would have been polite.\"\nThe couple were both students at the university in the 1910s before marrying in 1915. \nCurtis said that when she tried to log in to the fictitious profiles this morning, she got an automated message from Facebook saying the accounts had been disabled for violating the social network's terms of service. \n\"I guess popularity kills,\" Curtis said. \nCurtis actually set the McDonald and Lewis profiles up more than two years ago \u2014 but it wasn't until last week, when she began providing more frequent status updates and photos, that they began attracting attention from the media and public. While McDonald and Lewis initially only had friends who were distant relatives, their lists of connections swelled from just over 100 each to more than 1,000. They were featured in Mashable, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Yahoo! News and the UK's Daily Mail.\nLewis and McDonald posted historically accurate status updates about their lives, photos of campus events such as \"hop\" dances and \"Rugby Football matches\" and listed musicians such as Scott Joplin and writers including Jane Austen among their favorites. Their profiles were hailed by many experts as a powerful example of social media's power to bring history to life for a digitally absorbed generation. \nBut, as fake profiles, McDonald and Lewis clearly violated the first rule of Facebook registration: \u201CYou will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.\u201D Curtis said that she realized McDonald and Lewis were illegal aliens on Facebook, but never had time after their popularity boom to make the necessary changes. \n\"I should have made them into Pages, probably, but just got so busy responding to people's friend requests that I wasn't able to do it,\" she said.\nNow, she just hopes to get access to the content she posted one more time so that she can more easily continue the project in another form. She hasn't yet been able to make contact with a live Facebook representative.\nThe project's recognition and acclaim has given her some ideas and motivation to continue increasing the connection between history and modern social networking. \n\"It would be cool to have a network for historical figures,\" she said. \"I wanted to call it Faceback.com, but someone already has the domain name.\"\nMashable has reached out to Facebook for comment.\nUPDATE: McDonald and Lewis were reincarnated \"in a skeletal way,\" Curtis said, as Pages on Wednesday afternoon."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/01/11/facebook-kills-fake-historical-profiles/>