Remember Second Life? The service, launched by Linden Labs back in 2003, has lost a bit of steam recently. All of the hype that accompanied this online virtual world when it first appeared evaporated as people got caught up in a frenzy over Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools such as Google Buzz. However, Second Life hasn't gone away, In fact, Linden Labs has just launched a beta version of a new Second Life viewer with some interesting new features. 

Image by ialja via Flickr

The UK's Sun newspaper carried a nasty little news story this week. According to the tabloid, a couple addicted to playing an online computer game let their real-life baby starve to death, because they got so engrossed in their virtual world that they ignored the real one. The dark irony? Their task in the online world was to raise a virtual, digital daughter.

An interesting site has sprung up in the last few days. Please Rob Me is a production of Forthehack, an incubator for new web ideas. The site does one thing, and does it well - it tells you who's not at home, so that you can go and rob them. That's right - rob their empty homes. But it doesn't actually want burglars to go calling, it's just trying to make a point.

Back in the old days, phone calls were discrete things that you did when you specifically wanted to talk with someone. You'd dial a number, someone would answer, you'd talk about what you needed to discuss, and then you'd hang up. But Internet communication is changing all that, as several online services are showing us.

Maybe it's time to think about not using Google. Sure, the company comes up with lots of innovative services, such as Buzz, its latest, released this week. But I'm beginning to wonder whether the company has any idea about its users' rights at all.

Oh dear. Someone at Vodafone UK is going to have a very unhappy weekend. Earlier today, someone within the company used its official Twitter account to send a message that had very little at all to do with mobile phones, or the support thereof, and everything to do with their planned sexual activities over the weekend. We won't post a picture of the offending message (which has been taken down), but The Register has a copy if you want to read it. It isn't safe for work.

The best use of technology, like most things, is to help others. Sure, sitting on your backside for four hours playing Mass Effect 2 is edifying in some ways, but there's nothing like a bit of philanthropy to feel truly fulfilled. When the Haiti disaster struck, thousands of geeks across the US got together for code hacking workshops in an initiative called CrisisCamp. They built, on a voluntary and unpaid basis, software systems to map resources in Haiti, to help reunite families, and to aggregate news for aid workers.

Apparently, your brain simply isn't up to Facebook. At least, it isn't if you have more than 150 online friends. Oxford University professor Robin Dunbar (who would, you'd think, be used to keeping lots of things in his head at once) says that we're generally only capable of managing 150 friendships at a time. He teaches evolutionary anthropology at the esteemed university, and came up with that figure, calling it "Dunbar's number". Our neocortexes (the bits of our brains that manage conscious thought) are apparently incapable of handling any greater number.