so you joined orkut and use it to map your social network.

thats the usual paradigm of a zillion clients to one server.

i say keep your social-network information on a locally running database. use a common data exchange format. searches, data gathering, etc, are done in a distributed fashion. "list all my friends" used to be a query on orkut's sql database, but instead it should query the little databases of all the users it knows of who keeps their data stored locally.

sure its slow but you keep the control(sort of) and it leads people to think more peer-to-peer. orkut, instead of a web site could be a locally running application or maybe the website could still work but aggregate and cache the answers from the users' machines.

break down the client/server paradigm! free your mind!