"in 25 years, we will all get rich buying and selling virtual goods"

Kinda like the financial market, then?

And who would want a virtual house, virtual food, a virtual vehicle? I mean, since we'll ALL get rich with the virtual stuff... Or didn't he really mean it?

i get the impression that they're trying to talk faster than their audience can think, so as to prevent anyone from figuring out that it's all a load of marketing baloney.

all this virtual potential is really just so much bovine digestive byproduct; or maybe it doesn't like being called that, perhaps it is bull-generated fecal matter.

whatever the name, the smell is the same, but at least it's good fertilizer.

I've checked with my bank - my real house isn't even virtually mine. A virtual two bedder at this stage seems much more "where the market is right now" .. eonomically speaking.

The first step then, would logically need 42Be .... a Virtual Financial Market for Zero day Traders ......Virtualisation Drivers ......a Service in which ITS Drivers need to be Hot Wired/Wirelessly Tuned into the TEMPESTuous Nexus for Continuity Source Code Generation to InterNetworking Operating Systems ......Macros in the Matrix 42 XXXXtend in Stealth and Deeply Embed AI Subliminal Control of Globalised Communications for Present Day Markets Integration with HyperVisionary OverSight.

It is illogical and most improbable, that any other than those working in, and au fait with the Virtualisation Genre/Technology/Methodology/call it what you will, will do enough or even anything to further advance the Intelligence Process which has Viable Imagination replacing Memory as the de facto Lead Processor Parameter for Future Computing Needs and Feeds, which will eliminate/abrogate Competition, [which gives an ever-increasingly expensive, Ebb and Flow, Alternating Current to Development], replacing it instead with Open Source Collaboration for a Common Global Purpose. IT is therefore incumbent upon the Virtualised Sector to make ITs Case to the Money Markets, without recourse to or thoughts of crashing them, just because they can.

Would you agree?

And if you would, that is surely the case well enough made for even the slowest-witted of Money Markets.

And taking IT to a very logical XXXXStream, which is an Integral Part to a greater or lesser extent/intent in every Live Being/Entity/System, it will also Lead with an Immaculately Conceived Brothel/Pleasure Palace Chain, so that Gratitude can be Replenished with AI NEUKlearer Sexual Energy Reciprocation.

Core Locations for HyperRadioProActive Care and Maintenance/Mentoring and Monitoring........ and Sex Sells Well the more you have to Offer with Love.

And interestingly enough, a discrete email order, fashion presence allied to such a Chain/Network, with all possible instruction and duty of care with information made perfectly clear, would transfer the Virtualised InterNetworking XXXXStream to a Realising Social Sphere.......allowing for discrete and yet intimate XPloration of Privileged Offerings from Relative Semantic Strangers.

A Horses for Courses Dressed for Fun at Work, Rest and Play thing...... but and definitely for Lover Adults XXXX Only . The Web is for the Nursery Slopers not ITs Dedicated Networks.

"Ten years out...I think social networking will be woven into pretty much every product and every thing we touch. It will be part of both our online lives and our real-world lives."

*falling on knees, hands in the air and shouting NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*

I can handle a world where war is rampant, where you have to watch out if your food is not "enhanced" and where people stab each other over 500ml of water. but social networking woven in every product and every thing we touch, thats too much.

I make a prediction: Second life = Tamagotchi

"We believe there's a world five years down the road - three years down the road - where the most common thing you do on a social network is buy the things you want to dress up your profile with and the applications you need in order to do that.”

I don't know how many on here use facebook, but recently there's been a proliferation of literally hundreds of pointless applications to add to your account, and they're almost universally rubbish. People add them, use them once, and then don't touch them again. Surely the point of social networking is to talk to your friends? That's what most people I know seem to be doing on there.

Also read in the Telegraph that facebook is planning on having revenues of $6bn by 2016 and therefore must be worth about $6bn now. Living in dreamworld, if you ask me, but it's quite possible Yahoo! may take leave of their senses entirely.. Friendsreunited was the next big thing a relatively short time ago and now looks tired and sad. Facebook became popular in the first place because it offered people the ability to add any number of pictures for free, so they could now actually see the people they may not have seen for five or ten years. If someone else comes up with a similar vital difference in five years time, facebook will be in much the same position as friendsreunited is now. Though maybe that's why it's being saturated with 'features' so much now..

What a bunch of losers.

Karl Jacob hit the nail on the head - and bounced the hammer in the direction of where reality will end up.

Let's stop to consider what Jacobs said: people will be using virtual "bling" to alter their appearances in the virtual world. Later he mentions incorporating databases into our clothing.

Well...isn't this all possible by converging ubiquitous WiFi with RFID tags?

Consider this possibility: You can have your "stuff" in both the real world and the virtual one. When you buy a REAL Gucci hand-bag, or a REAL pair of Porche sunglasses, the RFID tag - registered at manufacturing time - automatically brings the appropriate {icons,skins,backgrounds} from the manufacturer's "bling" repository and adds them to your virtual persona. So when you walk into a meeting in a Giorgio Armani suit, this is registerd not only on the Meat audience, but on the virtual participants as well.

Yeah, and it opens up a whole new world of virtual fraud and crime. A very Karma-satisfying situation: it keeps the Ying and Yang of Good and Evil in balance...

He wants people to know that they don't need imagination to have personality. "Self-expression is a very powerful concept," he explained. "We want to take people away from the idea that they have to do it themselves and that they can buy forms of self-expression in the virtual world."

<bill hicks impression>

And I pray for a nuclear holocaust in five minutes.

</bill hicks impression>

He wants us to "buy forms of self-expression"; if that doesn't defeat the point of self-expression then I don't know what does. Don't need imagination to have personality indeed. At least his underlying aim is clear. All hail Mammon!

I'll keep that in mind. Second Life : The Tamagochi world.

Fitting.