If your reasons for avoiding avatar-addled hangouts like Second Life is because they come off to you as, well, childish — take heart. The numbers bear out that assessment, as it appears pre-teen kids are more active users of graphically-rendered online social networks than adults are:

[Disney-owned] Club Penguin, where members pay $5.95 a month to dress and groom penguin characters and play games with them, attracts seven times more traffic than Second Life. In one sign of the times, Electric Sheep, a software developer that helps companies market their brands in virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com, last week laid off 22 people, about a third of its staff.

So feel free to flip off some Second-Lifer with a derogatory “Grow up!” the next time they bore you about how rad their online existence is.