Is Barack Obama actually using the social media tracking tool FriendFeed to follow tech gurus Andrew McLaughlin, Chris Messina, Chris Pirillo, Dave Winer, Dave Sifry (how'd he slip in there?), Fred Wilson, Jason Calacanis, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Arrington, Loic le Meur, Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Steve Rubel, and Susan Mernit along with lowly tech-politics bloggers like Patrick Ruffini, Luigi Montanez, Josh Levy and yours truly?

Alas, the answer appears to be a big fat "No," according to a source inside the Obama internet team. Someone is "squatting" on the Obama name on Friendfeed, apparently--though they don't appear to be using it in a malicious way.

One of the quirks of all these new services for sharing and tracking information, like Friendfeed and Twitter, is that their owners appear to be quite comfortable tolerating this practice. Every now and then, they are validating the presence of real celebrities using their services; for example, Biz Stone of Twitter mentioned not long ago in the company's e-newsletter that @Hodgman was the real John Hodgman, the actor. But it's a murky murky world out there...

UPDATE: It looks like someone is probably also squatting on the McCain Friendfeed account. A few more Rs here, including David All, Soren Dayton, William Buetler, and Mike Turk. Whoever is doing this at least knows the right people to hang around.