Ecotron is new feature/device in Habbo Hotel:
"The Ecotron is the latest in Furni recycling systems. No longer will you have to delete your room, turn off the computer or dump your unwanted Furni on a friend. Now you can throw it all into the Ecotron and get some brand new Furni back! Open the catalog and click and drop your unwanted Furni into the Ecotron - when you've put enough in, the power bar will turn green. You can either accept the bounty or continue to fill up the Ecotron for the next gift."
"In Habbo, it is possible to recycle the virtual furni that you don’t need anymore. In exchange for recycling the old items, using a recycling device called Ecotron, the Habbo user receives a brand new piece of furni, which is in fact created from the old materials, or so the design makes you believe. In a virtual world the bits of data are of course always new.
A joke? Maybe not. Since it's launch, the Ecotron device has recycled 4.634.117 pieces of virtual furniture and the amount increases all the time."
Why do I blog this? recycling is, a priori, an intriguing practice in digital environment (in which everything is recyclable by definition, because of the "code" nature of artifacts). What is more striking here is the spatial/artifact recycling which may be meant to bring people to recycle material stuff (after being used to recycle digtial stuff)?
I wish Habbo's artifacts could also age and evolve over time, but this recycle bit is a step towards re-thinking the evolution of digital objects.