As the social media scene continues to grow, more and more of real life starts to be emulated in the digital world as experiences and goods are ported over to virtual landscapes. We have virtual friends, virtual hobbies, pets, books, and lives.

It’s no wonder that the business of virtual goods has exploded from a North American market of $20 million to around $2 billion in just the last three years, according to Viximo co-founder, Brian Balfour (27).

Viximo is a company that has been riding the swelling tidal wave of virtual goods since May of 2007 by providing a platform that allows any social media site to quickly implement virtual goods. Virtual goods are the “new way to monetize the social web” says Balfour. With a background in the social media realm, Balfour watched the social media market explode in Asia, and with co-founder Sean Lindsay, created a company that would facilitate the rise of virtual goods in the U.S.

So what exactly are virtual goods?

If you use Facebook you see them all the time in the form of Facebook gifts – maybe a graphic of a puppy or a rose that you can gift to a loved one (even if you only love them on the Internet). Examples like these, along with minigames, mobile apps, and other things you can buy or give on a social media platform are all virtual goods.

You might ask “why would I want virtual goods?” and I might ask you the same question. Virtual goods can seem frivolous, but people eat them up. For someone that runs a social media site, virtual goods are not only a way to monetize your users, but also a way to encourage participation by giving a fun new way for your users to interact with one another.

That’s where Viximo comes in. These guys deliver a supply of virtual goods and a virtual storefront that can be dropped into a social media site with a few lines of code. The company provides, goods, helps you sell them, and analytics to monitor their sales. In addition to the virtual store and built-in analytics, Viximo even provides a system for users to buy virtual currency. After all, the psychology of spending sees an interesting twist when people are spending points or credits instead of cold hard cash.

Until now, Viximo has been dealing in virtual gifts made by in-house designers, but they are about to make a big move in the next month by bringing goods from third party designers.

With this addition, designers will have a unified space to deal their virtual wares, and social media site operators will have a marketplace to find them. Viximo will simply play the middle-man, connecting these two parties, providing analytics for implementers, and taking a cut of this huge market.

Having seen “unbelievable growth” since the foundation of Viximo, Balfour is convinced that virtual goods are “the hot thing right now” and Viximo is on top of the game. To be honest I can’t see the appeal in most of these virtual goods, (though I’m not quite as opposed as our neo-luddite, Dave) but it’s hard to argue with a $9 billion global market. Like Madonna said, “we are living in a material world,” even if those materials are digital. People living in a digital world want to buy digital stuff, and who are non-consumers to say they can’t?