I am not alone...

Yes, it's official, I am not alone in my rather sad and childish addiction to the agricultural time waster that is Farmville. I stumbled across a news story on Sky News today confirming something that I long suspected.... Farmville (an online game played through Facebook) has more users than the whole of Twitter! Now THAT'S a lot of virtual dungaree wearing geeks! To be honest, I knew the game was hugely popular as almost all my friends on Facebook seem to have been sucked in by the lure of harvesting 'circus peanuts' from cartoon elephants (ranging from younger 10 year old cousins to Aunties and Uncles), but bigger than Twitter? Wow...

What started as an innocuous neighbour request invite from my (older, I might add) cousin, has resulted in my getting up for work way before I actually need to, purely because I had to 'harvest my pumpkins' which I accidentally planted at the wrong time (different crops mature at different rates. Plant some strawberries at midnight and you'll have to harvest them at 4am or lose your 'farmville' cash as they wither and die).

Don't ask me what the allure is. You don't get ACTUAL money from becoming a successful online old MacDonald (although you can spend you real hard earned day job cash on special decorations and animals if you were so inclined... I have not... yet...). Perhaps it's my love of collecting needless and rather pointless objects that keeps me logging in. Every time I find a new special edition 'white' tabby cat, or a 'rare' pair of shears, my heart beats a tiny bit faster and the corners of my mouth turn up ever so slightly. I even set my mother and my boyfriend up with dummy farms so I can log into their facebook accounts and send myself extra 'gifts'. I think I may need help. But there are some positives from this insane and pointless addiction. Users managed to raise over $1,000,000 for the Haiti disaster relief fund through purchasing limited edition seeds. At least some good came of our 'fruitless' ploughing.

At the time of writing, Sky said that Farmville had over 69,000,000 active users. Now how the hell do I find all these people so they can send me free cows?!