I must have been living under a rock for not knowing about this, but now I'm seeing it everywhere.   Take your average hyperlink to the blog of your friend or colleague (or both) and add "rel=friend colleague" to it, as per the instructions that wordpress has, and voila, a little icon appears next to the link when you mouseover (at least it would seem to do so in both IE7 and Firefox 2.0), so you can instantly see if someone has any friends or not!  Even more useful than that, according to wordpress, is that there is a such engine called Rub Hub, that will let you search by URL to pull up all the relationships gleaned from that site/blog.  So you really *can* instantly see all the friends, colleagues, whatever, that someone has. I can't imagine all the new "web 2.0" toys that are emerging out there are going to help my carpal tunnel any.