SpeedPlexer Blog

The L.A. Times Tech Blog alerted us to a new website that is much like eBay, but is basically free, saving you even more money with internet speed.  Listia.com allows you to bid on items using free credits that you earn, instead of money. How do you earn them?  Well, you get 500 credits just for signing up. And then you can also refer friends or “sell” your own stuff on the site, earning credits from the highest bidder.

There are a few situations that you would use real money though.  One is for delivery or shipping, which Listia leaves up to the parties to work out for themselves.  The other is when you don’t have enough credits to get the item you want, Listia will sell you credits–ten credits per dollar.

They’ve got stuff like a wireless router, a Nokia N95 phone (without battery or cords), and an electric guitar. But why would anyone want to get rid of it for free?  Well, you may have put something up on eBay and had it not sell, but you still really want to see it go. Or you’re too lazy to have a yard sale and spend your weekend sweating it out on your front lawn for a measly twenty-five cents profit. It doesn’t matter, because they don’t require an explanation.   

And to get everyone hooked on trading, they offer “rewards auctions”. They say, “To reward the active users of the site we’ll be putting up some big ticket items for you to bid on! Up first is a brand new black Flip Video UltraHD.” Their second offering is a Samsung 32 inch LCD HDTV, and this one will give 60% of the profits (from people buying credits, I guess) to charity.  And as a rewards auction, Listia pays for the shipping! 

The free $50 of credits is only for a limited time, so it might be worth taking a walk around the house to see if there’s anything you might want to part with.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that Facebook is now just behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as the biggest sites in the world. Like commentating for a race clocked with internet speed, they say it blew past its rival MySpace last April, then passed Amazon in August, on its way to passing to eBay in January of this year and surging past AOL in February before finally passing Wikimedia last month.  Not too shabby.

In the month of June alone, TechCrunch reports that Facebook had 24 million new unique visitors over their numbers the previous month, bringing them up to a total of 340 million unique visitors globally. In the past year, they’ve grown 157%, adding an astounding 208 million visitors to their numbers.

In the U.S. though, Facebook’s 77 million unique visitors in June made it only the sixth largest site in the land behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and all the Fox Interactive Media sites combined.

But the jump between fourth place and third is pretty sizable. According to comScore, in June of 2009 Yahoo sites had 581 million unique visitors worldwide.  That’s another 241 million, but if they keep growing like they have been, they could theoretically make that in about another year. Microsoft sites clocked in at 691 million, a difference of 351 million. And Google sites are in the lead with 844 million unique visitors globally.  To pass them, Facebook would need another 504 million unique visitors.  So it may be a while before Facebook even enters the top 3, let alone reach its apparent goal of world domination.

The L.A. Times tech blog  recently pointed out that virtual reality has become so real to us, that we spend real money in our simulated worlds, with internet speed. 

Blogger Alex Pham tells us that according to a report released by Frank N. Magid Associates, about one in ten Americans spends an average of $30 on virtual goods—such as outfits, accessories, weapons and other items used in online games.

Of course, of the $1 billion worldwide spending projected for virtual goods this year, about 25% is expected to come from the U.S., the report said. Another firm that works in this market, Strategy Analytics, projected that the amount could grow to $17.3 billion in 2015.

“Why waste real money on intangible items?” he asks. A researcher with the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Vili Lehdonvirta, says that people buy intangible items to gain status, identity, membership, class and performance. Pretty much the same reasons we buy real items…once we’ve covered the ones that are necessary for our survival, that is.

If you have never encountered anything of this sort, check out the Playfish website. They’ve even come up with a way to donate some of the money spent on imaginary animals toward saving the real things by partnering with the World Wildlife Fund, which is cool. 

There are many types of games out there, a list of the most played games shows that people like to run virtual restaurants, hotels, ranches, and zoos in cyberspace. They like to visit and save virtual worlds, virtual animals, and have virtual families. We can only hope this virtual experience is somehow useful in the real world too, and maybe even in real-time.