You can ignore Facebook's stalking side-nature, but what you can't ignore is that other people own your life.
This is the reason I've resisted Web 2.0 social networking sites for as long as I have; and even though I do use some of them now, I try to use the bare minimum of them to get the functionality that I want.
Lets look at the ones I use now:
- last.fm - I don't really even use them right now. I mostly just wanted to see what it could do since it's been an option in Amarok forever. It's kinda neat to see what my friends have listened to recently.
- Face~~stalking~~ book - Again, I mostly wanted to see what the hype was about. I don't use it.
- Twitter - "What am I doing?" It's answered in the upper-right-hand corner of my website via Twitter's RSS feeds. Twitter doesn't scare me as much as other ones do since the data is so easy to pull out of it, but I worry that others aren't as concerned about who owns their memories.
- LinkedIn - This one seems to have the most potential, and is probably the hardest to replicate. It's like "three degrees to your dream job" (instead of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon). It seems to have the most potential.. and again, I don't own the data or have an easy way to get my data out.