Friendster.

In the same vein as below, an old friend found my email and invited me as a friend on friendster.com.

For those who have lived in a cave the last year or so, this is a six-degrees-of-seperation type of thing. You create a personal entry (hobbies, likes and dislikes and whatnot), and you invite friends. And all those friends invite their friends, and so on and so forth.

The real kicker, though, is that it keeps track of all these links. So I can look up random people, and see if/how they are connected to me. In my "personal network", there's over 76000 people, all of whom I'm connected to via friends and friends of friends, etc.

Pretty wacky.

The end result, of course, is people inviting people to be their "friends", simply so they can either get a higher count or access to more people. This is dumb, but that's the way it goes.