It always surprises me to see these imvu.com posts on HN. They are often insightful and interesting, but when you see the website you wonder who pays money for this. Do they sell virtual goods for their own virtual world, similar to secondlife?
Clothing, Furniture, Rooms, Avatars.
I've never heard of imvu before but I don't see how it's any different than micro-transactions within a MMO. If anyone plans to make the argument that MMO's are different because they have "gameplay", then you're probably someone that has never played a very social MMO before.
As an ex-EVE player, I can say with extreme confidence that at least 80% of our alliance ("guild"/social group) was not there to actually play the game. It's pretty common that after a certain amount of game time, you just see the "game" as a glorified chat room. It was an ongoing joke to point out how most of us paid $15 to CCP every month for the ability to talk to each other over XMPP.