Virtual goods are flying off the virtual shelves. It's time we started taking this new market seriously. Flirtomatic. , a London-based company, claims to have sold 100,000 gifts during the past four weeks in the run-up to Christmas. This wouldn't normally be of interest but Flirtomatic is a social network on mobile phones and the goods sold were all "virtual" They range from roses – which only exist as pixels on a screen – to a virtual "supersnog" The bestselling item is a Christmas stocking filled with goodies for which up to 2,000 users a day are prepared to pay the equivalent of 75p. On other sites people have been prepared to pay up to $20 for a virtual rose. Yes, the same generation of people not paying for music downloads from the web are paying real money for unreal goods. If all this seems barmy, hang on, as we may have to rearrange our prejudices. Flirtomatic.com, which also sells ice cubes that melt when they reach the recipient's phone, is but a minnow in a potentially
Pligg is an open source content management system that lets you easily create your own social network.
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