Last chance to refer a friend to nFold and stand a chance to win prizes worth more than R10,000! Winners will be announced on Fri 20 Oct.

Science Fiction has promoted the concept of virtual people for a long time; be they virtual reality simulations, super computers or even robots. And yet, virtual communities have existed on the Internet for a while. In fact, virtual customers can even buy virtual products from virtual companies.

1.8m users in SA connect using MXit (www.mxit.co.za):
The phenomenon of mobile messaging and chat rooms hit the headlines recently when MXit made it onto the cover of the Financial Mail. Their growth in users wanting to chat to their friends using text messaging on their mobile phones has shown the mythical hockey stick curve that most companies aspire towards. And most of their users are under 25. They make loads of "moola's" when users send premium-rated sms messages to chat longer. I was amused by the insightful comment of an addicted school kid who settled her parents fears by saying: "Why would I talk to random people when I can just talk to my friends?"

150m users in China connect on QQ (http://www.qq.com):
That's one in five people in the fastest growing population in the world! Don't be surprised if you can't understand a word on this website. It's Chinese to me too. If you want to be in on the action, you'll have to go here (http://qq.bur.st/) to learn the lingo. It's nice to know that local company Naspers is earning some money for us by being a 36% shareholder in Tencent, who runs the site.

Yahoo, MSN and Google still compete for most popular site on the planet:
The race between the world's favourite websites is still neck in neck. If you want to track the top 500, or see SA's most popular websites, or even those in every country from Argentina to Yemen, be my guest (http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500).