Latest Fad: Imaginary Girlfriends Up For Bid
from the ah,-memes-in-time-for-Valentine's-day dept
I'm always amazed at how quickly one little silly internet concept turns into a huge fad. Remember the cyber-begging sites? Or flash mobs? Well, the latest meme to shoot to the top of the list appears to be virtual girlfriends up for bid on eBay. People have been talking about these for a little while now around the blog universe, but it's become a big enough story that even Reuters has written about it - meaning that even more people are going to jump on the bandwagon. The idea is that some woman (and it's almost always a woman - though, I've seen at least one male offer to be a "imaginary stalker ex-boyfriend") offers up her services as an "imaginary girlfriend". She'll email or chat with you, write you letters, talk to you on the phone, so that you (assuming you're really this pathetic) can pretend to have a girlfriend. After a designated time period (some allow you to "extend" your subscription), a choreographed breakup is arranged. Many promise to then make a staged effort at winning you back. While there are plenty of such offerings on eBay (though, eBay is now removing them), I have to wonder if anyone actually buys such a thing. I guess it's sort of a poor-man's virtual escort service. Still, a good reporter would have investigated these things a bit further to at least try to come up with one poor sucker with too much money who actually paid for one of these charades. At the same time, I'm sure this sort of thing is being adopted by scammers, spammers and porn sites to lure in a few suckers. Now, if this follows the patterns of other silly fast-growing internet memes, there will soon be sites online completely dedicated to such imaginary girlfriends, and maybe (now that eBay is cracking down) someone will actually create a niche auction site just for such things... which no one will ever use.
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I don't know about "poor man"
I dunno. The prices I saw quoted on a few blogs that wrote about this was in the $200-$300 range, which is good enough for one "date" with a typical escort. So while you are right about "virtual", the price point seems about the same (although I guess the virutal service lasts longer than the real one, which is usually an hour).
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