Pet Rocks in cyberspace.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: RUNDLES wrap-up

I have written several times over the years on the virtues of small, as in "Small is Beautiful" and other paeans to the notion of less consumption. The older I get the more I find I need fewer things, and the less impressed I am with other people's stuff.

Indeed, sometimes I get it into my head that I want something--an MP3 player, a new DVD, a particularly handsome suit--and, once acquired, the satisfaction seems most unfulfilled. It makes a lot of Christmas anticlimactic, and most everything about birthdays not only superfluous, but dreadful.

But even anti-consumerism has its limits. I read with great interest that the popular and currently hottest-on-the-planet Web phenomenon Facebook is selling, at $1 a pop, virtual gifts. Yes, Send your friend or loved one a penguin, or a hamburger, or a flower or a bowl of soup. Not real, of course, but a drawing, a version, I suppose, of what they call emoticons in Web-speak.

I had a younger friend, a "member" of the Face book community, show me the virtual gift section of the site, and discovered, at that moment, the store was stocked with 363 virtual gifts. Act fast, though, because if you want to send that special someone a half-inch virtual black cat, it is being offered in a limited edition; once 100,000 of them are gone, that's it.

While these gifts might be virtual, the sales are not. Since the introduction of the concept last February, Facebook has taken in something in excess of $24 million in real money.

My first reaction was "Dang!?! I wish I had thought of that." I mean, c'mon; who knew that in 10 months you could coax $24 million out of peoples' pockets for, let's face it, nothing? Back when I was young and into everything hip and cutting-edge, some guy made a fortune selling everyday stones, marketed as "Pet Rocks," but he at least had them packaged and had to ship them.

It is easy, of course, to make this sound ridiculous, and the knee-jerk reaction is "Wow, who would be so stupid to pay for nothing???" But then, it's only a buck, and a cutesy way of saying to someone, "Don't say I never gave you anything," as you attach a virtual car...