Over at the Chicago Tribune's blogs, Eric Benderoff has proposed an interesting question -- are we becoming a little bit fatigued of being added as everyone's "friends" on everything?
Social media's got big buzz these days, and as a phenomenon is one of the bigger drivers of casual multiplayer online worlds. Can you be Facebook friends with your beer buddies and your boss, Benderoff asks, or is a George Costanza-style "worlds colliding" moment taking place?
Granted, virtual worlds and Facebook may be having some moments of overlap these days, but are still separate kinds of products at the end of the day -- kids don't have to worry, for example, about getting friend requests from their parents in a virtual world for children, since that kind of product has not been designed to appeal to adults, and virtual worlds developers seem to be increasingly tailoring their products towards more specific niches within the audience.
But that doesn't mean that fatigue-2.0 might not have a reverberating effect on other kinds of new web media -- it's clear that there are many types of virtual worlds products for many different types of purposes, but it could be tough for them to gain ground if they're suffering from connectivity fatigue induced by other online tools.
How about you? Are you just a little Facebook, IMVU and Twittered-out?
