Not douchy at all - I sometimes very much feel the same way you do. The vision, as I saw it in 2008, was this: Social Networkin 1.0 was about connecting with p

Not douchy at all - I sometimes very much feel the same way you do. The vision, as I saw it in 2008, was this: Social Networkin 1.0 was about connecting with people online, that you had already met in real life. (You added a friend on Facebook, because you already knew them). The next evolution of Social Networking was about people discovery. IT was about leveraging all that data we had online about ourselves, and our friend graph, to connect with new people based on our needs. Need to connect with someone at Amazon? Need to find a date for next week? Need a new cycling buddy? Chances are that your new professional contact/date/cycling partner are just a friend away. Manufacturing the serendipity to make you connect with them is what we envisioned. It's really powerful if you think about it - life comes down to relationships (and I don't mean that in a pure network-y sense). It's also extremely monetizeable. Dating websites and LinkedIn make their money off of being the gatekeeprs to new relationships. If you can build the platform that is used for all of those contexts - you have the next big thing. (And Facebook just rolled out their attempt at this, which is stumbling with problems of identity and intent, but they'll figure it out hopefully)