Oh, You Shouldn't Have

Once you reach a certain point in your life, most of us become something less of a consumer. Marketers know that: thus when you hit the big 55, you're out of the last at least quasi-desirable consuming demographic  of 49-54 years.

Oh, we're the target for denture cleaners, 5o+ vitamins, burial insurance, but these are all things that have to do with falling apart, hanging on, or moving on. No one's aiming the big purchase ads at us anymore.

The fact is that, you reach a point where it's not just a matter of not wanting to accumulate more stuff - it becomes a matter of wanting to lighten the load by getting rid of some of that stuff you've taking a lifetime to accumulate.

I haven't yet reached the de-accumulate stage yet, but I was a minor beneficiary of my mother and my grandmother when they went into 'get rid of it' mode. Thus, I have the cool little water colors my mother's friend Anne painted for her as an engagement present. And the yellow plate with the hand-painted fruit that hangs in my kitchen. Not to mention the steer horns that hung in my grandfather's saloon which, at some point when she was in her 80's, Nanny realized she didn't really care to have any longer.

So I was intrigued to read in The Boston Globe about the "virtual gifts" for sale on social networking sites.

The gifts are icons that people pay anywhere from a quarter to ten bucks.

You can send a friend with a pooch a squirrel icon from Dogster.com. (Or, since - on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog - you could be sending that virtual squirrel to a real dog.)

Not surprisingly, Facebook is well into this, and, since they started selling virtual gifts in February 2007, they've sold 27 million of them.

Gifts in the Facebook catalog include images of pints of beer, penguins, pretzels, and toilet paper rolls. Users can send them to friends privately, but most people keep them public as badges of honor - or connections. The gifts are sold in limited numbers to create demand. As of yesterday, there were about 40,000 of 50,000 espresso bean gifts left but only about 3,000 jacuzzis.

Somerville, Massachusetts startup Viximo creates virtual gifts and sells them through Facebook. They have 15 employees, and also work with graphic artists from just about anywhere. (Viximo looks like a fun place, with an obvious sense of humor. Their "'design evangelist'" Jeff Clark, was quoted in The Globe article, and his quote "'It's like self-expression almost'" is cited on their website as the worst quote in the interview. They also have a blog with the tagline: Because you're not a real startup unless you're filling the internet with more crap.)

I'm not a big "live life virtually" kind of person. Some of it - like having your avatar attend religious services, or have sex, on Second Life - I find quite weird.

But there's a lot to like about the virtual gifts:

• They aren't petroleum based
• They don't have to be trucked across the country
• They don't take up any room
• They won't end up in a landfill

Yes, I know that data centers use energy, and that old PCs do end up in landfills.

But if all of us cut our "real" consumption by a few percentage points, and substituted "virtual" consumption, we might not be completely fulfilling our citizen responsibility to mindlessly accumulate crap we don't need, but we'd be adding a bit to the economy - think of those Viximo artists - and we might just be making the world a better place.