Some interesting dishes on the Social Networking Menu

II. Virtual lives

As a hard core role-playing gamer, I always had several virtual identities sometimes even blurring the boundaries between the worlds of reality and my 2-D screen. The concepts of “avatars” or alter egos on the virtual plane, character switching, and varied interactions between a real life person and his avatar are certainly fascinating experiments on psychology and sociology and opens up a Pandora’s box of networking opportunities.

However, virtual worlds are not limited to games but, depending on the degree of immediacy presented, can encompass computer conferencing and text based chatrooms - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_world

Here are some more info about Second Life, an online interactive world.
http://secondlife.com/whatis/
and the dangers of virtual lives..
http://www.hz-journal.org/n12/board.html