People networks - where to register?

We are in a time of so-called social services being as abundant as never before. Which means that every week there's an abundancy of services with the basic idea to connect people. As it seems difficult to know where to register (I just joined the third virtual media shelf and am starting to loose track on how many services I am registered to at all), I would like to propose the following characterization:

• Media-based recommendation networks - aggregate books, music and videos you own or like to find people with similar media consumption preferences and have the service recommend other media items or people with similar (media) preferences. Examples are librarything, shelfmates, moviepilot (in German),only to name a few
  
• Sequential media recommendation services: specify a preferred media item and have the service recommend you similar items, such as last.fm or Pandora
  
• Location-based networks - share ratings about localizable entities (e. g. shops, restaurants, monuments, museums) and use the service as a kind of collaborative tourist guide. These service are often available in web-based and / or mobile versions, and some of them include automatic localization. Examples are qype, qiro, townster.
  
• Offer-and-demand-based networks - share your professional experience, your hobbies or your needs in order to find what you're looking for, e. g. a new job, a relationship, a professional (e. g. craftsman) to get a job done, etc. Examples include Xing, LinkedIn, MyHammer (in German), Friendster, not to mention the zillions of dating platforms.
  
• (Micro)publishing sites, such as weblog hosting services, twitter or jaiku
  

I am not sure where resource aggregation services for photos, videos or bookmarks fit into that classification, as the social network and recommendation factor does not seem to be prominent with regards to services such as flick.r, YouTube and del.icio.us.

Also, as this is only a first attempt, I do welcome comments that are geared towards expanding this classification. More specifically, does anyone know of other attempts to classify all these fancy services that claim to be Web2.0?

Finding what you're searching for

I do not have precise numbers regarding how much the amount of information on the World Wide Web has been increasing in the past couple of years, but from my searches I get the impression that the same information is available in an exceedingly high number of copies (so to say), be it news, frequently asked questions, or product information, just to name a few.

Every now and then, the magic word natural language search pops up, producing about 104 million hits on Google if I just type in the words, and still 226.000 hits if put into quotation marks - which is way too much to handle. Others have written about the topic before, so I am not going to repeat what has been said before, but the question is what can be done to find the information in something that seems like a huge haystack of Web pages.

Why is everyone using Google? Because it actually does quite well, and I can second that I mostly do not have to go beyond the first couple of result pages to find the information I want. If it does not appear, either my search turns out to have been too unspecific, or the information is not available at all.

Enter startup companies such as Powerset that claim to revolutionize search. I doubt that, given that it is hard to extract any semantics from most searches, which do only contain about three significant search terms or less. I would assume that natural language search may be able to yield decent results, but is the benefit (from the point of view of the users) really as significant as claimed? I am not so sure about this.

The problem is not that our search technologies are not good enough. It is that there is too much information to search within. So, I suspect that the future lies in dedicated search engines for specific domains (e. g. news) rather than a new universal search engine.