I couldn’t agree with you more and have refused pointedly to avoid all the above (with the exception of Google and last.fm, of course).

Regarding the statement “What I want to see some pervasive, accepted way of having one giant friend list that is bound to me…”, why not just carry a USB thumbdrive with your friend’s email addresses?

Works for me :-)

P.S. I stumbled on your site through the ipv6_enabled list and like you have been running linux almost exclusively at home for about 15 years (starting w/slakware) and hope to soon have a public facing ipv6 web site up and running – it actually runs like a top now, but I’m working on some routing issues – ipv6.flny.us – and as you have probably guessed, flny stands for Finger Lakes New York.