I have yet to find a social networking service that isn't just a bunch of crappy collaboration tools glued together in a dating site format.

Take Orkut communities. They're just low rent versions of web based message boards that have been around for quite a while now. There are communities for just about any subject already, but technology-wise they offer nothing that other online communication tools haven't been doing better for some time now. Ditto for most of the other features orkut has. Do we really need to reinvent email, message boards, IRC, and IM; badly?

Yeah, you can read someone's profile. But that's really more useful on a special purpose dating site. For most other purposes it's just not need to know information. Does the fact that you can't easily call up Linus's preferences in movies matter at all in the context of discussions about the Linux kernel? I don't think so.

I don't see the value added, quite the opposite in fact. Orkut interests me more as a playground for bots that game it's various ranking systems than anything that I would use to meet people and exchange information.