Long term goals are things like becoming self-sustaining with skills like cooking and construction. You'll want to decorate and expand your house, create farm/herb plots, grow food in order to create fancy meals and herbs to create potions and tinctures that provide assorted benefits. Building machines lets you create furniture, materials, tools, etc, which are the more industrial activities. A huge ongoing goal for collectors/completionists is the massive library of badges/achievements. Each badge gives a reward, so they're like mini quests themselves. There's also "Cubimals", which are collectable wind-up toys and are very sought after (for the rare ones, anyway).
My daily needs in Glitch these days (because I enjoy farming) include growing herbs in order to create Yellow Crumb Flowers, Hairball Flowers and Rubeweed; I shuck the Crumbs for seeds because they make good donating material at the Shrines, and I'm working towards getting a full set of Giant Idols (created by combining 11 Emblems, which you gain after donating a sufficient amount to the appropriate Shrine). Hairball Flowers are turned into a tincture that provides a movespeed buff; I use these when travelling through the Ancestral lands, because there's a timer that kicks you out after 10 minutes or so. Faster movement means I can spend more time in there, triggering Traps and dodging Juju Bandits, both of which have associated badges to achieve. The Rubeweed tincture summons The Rube: an NPC who makes ridiculous, random trades. He once traded me a Class Ax for a bottle of Hooch. I also donate Meat, so I spend a lot of time wandering the world looking for Piggies to nibble. Doing all these things earns me lots of iMG, which I spend on Upgrade cards that give me new abilities/actions or enhance things like how high I can jump, how fast I can scrape barnacles, or my Quoin multiplyer (Quoins are little 'coins' found in the world that give you money, iMG, happiness or energy. You start with a limit of 100 per in-game day, but this can be increased, and their 'value' can be multiplied). Arguably the most important upgrade you can get, though, are the Brain upgrades, which ups your skill capacity and lowers the time penalties for learning more skills than your brain can currently 'hold'.
A recent addition to the game are the "Feat" events, which are global tasks that change every day or two, and all players globally work towards the goals. It's usually little more than a glorified "do X thousands of times" task, though, as far as I've seen so far, but you can get some rare items as rewards.
There's a vibrant community, and the Global chat channel is always active. Players are mature and helpful, for the most part. Many aspects of the game encourage doing good deeds to other Glitchen, so you'll often see people asking for players of level 3, 4, or 5, because there is a particular quest that rewards you for gifting items to newbies. The graphics may look a bit kiddy, but it's definitely not a kid's game, and swearing is not censored. Expect adult conversations occasionally. Go and "pet" some Wood trees and you'll see that this definitely isn't geared for young children.
Sorry for the long post. If you read it, though, I hope it gives you some idea of what to expect. Obviously I had to just stop typing at some point, but there's a lot more to do in the game besides what I've described here (like driving off Rook attacks, which are awesome, watch one here, though bear in mind it's very old footage and it's much less chaotic these days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpHjKlUAEgE&t=11m30s)