Having come of age online in the era immediately after the first Internet boom, I was naturally a bit wary of websites that describe themselves as "Web 2.0." Their pastel colors, misspelled names, and use of JavaScript to do everything concerned me. Articles noting the continual data serfdom that such websites promote only aggravated my worry.
Then I joined Mugshot. The site (made by Red Hat) purports to aggregate users' action on various websites. Alas, it is not very interesting when you are not a member of many of the sites, so I joined Flickr and Twitter and Reddit and Digg and a host of other sites (as you can see from my Mugshot page). I even rejoined Last.fm, which I left earlier this year (deleting my account) because of their lack of statistics export.
It was interesting for a while, but the only websites listed on Mugshot which I visit consistently are Facebook and last.fm, both of which I visited a lot before. I think the issue is that I was not a part of the "communities" of the other websites. I have over 300 "friends" on Facebook. Last.fm continually generates a set of musical "neighbors" for me.
By constrast, I have 3 friends on Twitter and Flickr, and none on Digg and Reddit. While the Samsung m610 is an okay phone (thank you Sprint), its camera does not compare to that of the w810i I used to use as my primary cell phone. In fact, it is bad enough in comparison that I no longer take pictures. This makes Flickr boring, unless I want to check up daily on how many people are looking at my pictures of mosques.
While the phrase, "I'm waiting for Web 3.0" is trite, many of today's websites could take a page from Last.fm and try to find your friends automatically. If I only had 30 friends on Facebook, would I feel obligated to check in and see what new photos and notes and wall posts they had made? Probably not.