"My time is being squandered online because I'm not getting experience points,"

"'My time is being squandered online because I'm not getting experience points,' Justin Hall declared, introducing the subject of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center. (link)

Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online -- and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can't the whole thing be a game -- a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day's surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him. What if you could get points of various kinds for various activities, and compete with your friends? What if you and your friends and their friends could constitute a sufficiently large population to add collaborative filtering to the mix -- making recommendations for things to learn, see, hear play, do? What if you could add social media for p2p and many to many communication, add your location-aware mobile telephone to the mix, and add a productivity function that generates and displays to-do lists? We're already being surveilled by police and marketers. Why not surveill each other and make a game of it? ("I reserve the right to fit the entire Internet in there," Hall said, during the discussion following his presentation.)"
http://www.passivelymultiplayer.com/ is Justin's website. Pretty sparse, but it's a neat idea.

I found out about it while checking out me.dium, a Firefox plugin that somehow (a) lets you chat with people who are on the same website you are, and (b) lets you see what websites your friends are visiting, and I found me.dium through this site.

It's a cool concept, I think - this sort of social networking while you do other stuff, combined with some kind of gamist scorekeeping for what you're doing.

Finally, check this out: http://packetgarden.com/ models your internet usage as a garden planet, based on the data uploaded and downloaded from various IPs around the world.