Mary S. Butler

I don’t have a Facebook profile and my MySpace page is just a placeholder. When I’m on MS it’s usually to look up a new band — new to me, anyway — I just heard about or to see what’s new with an old favorite. Yet, I can see the addictive qualities of both sites and understand why they are such pageview churners.

The only community site that I use regularly is Flickr. Despite the less-than-stellar resolution of my Moto Q pix, I love that I can upload them directly to Flickr a few seconds after snapping an image. And as I expand my list of contacts, I find I am checking back more frequently to see what they have posted as well. So, while I’m a daily Flickr visitor, I don’t consider myself a heavy user.

As those who live with heavy site users know, the addict needs to get their fix first thing in the a.m., regularly throughout the work day, as soon as they get home and last thing before lights out. Anyone married to a baseball nut fan who plays fantasy baseball should be quite familiar with this behavior.

I can scoff at heavy users no longer. I think I just found my online crack.

This morning was the launch of the Forbes.com Stock Game. Participants are given $1,000,000 of fantasy portfolio money to build and manage an online virtual portfolio and have six weeks to amass the most cash. The winner receives a cruise on The Highlander, the Forbes yacht, lunch with Steve Forbes and $20,000. As a former Forbes.com employee, I have both been on The Highlander and met Steve Forbes several times. And while the $20,000 is a nice incentive, shortly after I placed my first trade — for shares in the stock of my current employer — I couldn’t stop checking my portfolio throughout the afternoon to see how well I was doing. I must have generated several dozen pages in just one session as I made trades and tracked my portfolio performance. And yes, I do have real investments and a retirement to worry about, but that is decades down the road. As a long-term investor, I don’t obsess over daily dips in my holdings. Yet today I almost spent as much time on my fantasy portfolio on Forbes.com than I have cumulatively on 401K.com in the 10 years I have had a defined contribution plan with Fidelity. T.G. the contest is over in six weeks.