Social network services (Wikipedia) such as Friendster, Linkedin, OpenBC are one of the top "web 2.0" hypes. I'm very sceptical about them, because I don't see the real benefits for me. (I'm referring to the pure "keep contact with your schoolmates" thing, not stuff which does much more such as serious blogging - e.g. livejournal - or planets such as planet.debian)

The typical use case I've heard is much like "Imagine you have made a cool product, and want to sell it to some company. Now you can search for people at that company you know (or a friend of yours knows) and call them, this will help you get a feet in the door", as well as "you can use it for finding a job".

I think that's bullshit, and to a large extend because I'd neither be willing to update my information in these services all the time, nor would I be willing to help just everybody here - most likely I'd just delete and ignore the email, and be really annoyed by a call (I'm annoyed by calls anyway)...

It's not that I despise social networking per se. But I despise quantity instead of quality. I care a lot for my friends, and I'm in several groups grown around some technical issues; when someone is looking for a job I pay attention for suiteable offers around me; if someone needs something else I do try to help. But I'll only do that for people I'd really call friends.

If you just want a quantitative number, last I checked my ranking was #36 in the global PGP keyring, meaning I have the 36th shortest average distance worldwide to verify a cryptographical key. So what?

Of course I also tried one of the social networing services given above, joined a group for a university I was at. Even before the adminstrator of that group added me, I got an "invitation" by one "linkaholic". I rejected it, and even considered to report it as "spam" to the operator. I did indeed know that person, but all we had was a flamewar on a mailinglist, and I found him highly unsympatic. So why should I add him to my network? Where are the benefits for me (except that I'll maybe get an annoying call sometime in the future, when I could have forgotten about him)?

No, in my opinion this social networking hype is built entirely on a hype, basically saying "look how well-connected I am, everybody knows me, and I know everybody", even when these relationships are only present on the computer, without anything worth being called a "relationship" behind.

The flame-war I mentioned earlier was btw. on the topic of Resume/CV books. Which are even worse than this social networking thing, IMHO.

I have high respect for his writings, all I read were worth it.

He just wrote about Web 2.0, and I find this a very interesting read. I agree with him here, especially with the line "Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used."

Ajax is not fundamentally new. It's just JavaScript. It's still slow, has sometimes usability problems, and often just doesn't work right... And Ajax certainly isn't worth to be called "Web 2.0"...

What has been reappearing this year are "third party hacks" on the net. That was also the biggest thing about Google Maps: the API - others could use it (for free) to make other cool stuff with it. This is part of what Graham calls "Democracy" and of what he calls "Don't maltreat users" (especially not "lead users" and developers if you want them to adopt your stuff!)

But basically I still don't think we're at anything fundamentally new here. The API stuff for example makes me think of OpenSource vs. Freeware... getting stuff for free is nice, but being able to modify it to exactly fit your needs is priceless. ;-)