Not a rant!

This probably falls under the "crud" part, along with "random".

This place was recently pointed out to me:

http://www.ning.com/

and after the resounding wave of deja vu wore off, I realized that I remembered seeing this someplace before, a long long time ago in an Internet far far away...only back then it was called "Usenet" and social networks were called "Newsgroups".

Slap some javascript, CSS and an API on a webserver and everything old is new again.