Orkut and so on
Of course, the blogosphere has been all het up over orkut lately, at least partly because it has the google seal of approval, and everyone loves google.
I have yet to try it, but these gripes pique my curiosity.
To me, however, the more interesting question has to do with the a comparison between the sort of friendster-like social networking that has no context except itself and something like livejournal, where the ostensible purpose is journalling, but the result (supported by some social mechanisms) is a lot of social networking. My guess is that the latter is more likely to produce lasting connections, while the former is more of a toy/game, though that could just be the novelty factor. Certainly a lot of the friendster activity was around the fun of creating fakesters and sort of competing to see how many friendsters one could bag.