Being the resident web geek in my immediate circle of friends, I quite often get people coming and telling me: “you should totally check out SITE-SO-AND-SO because it is the best way to meet people.” These comments often make me shudder, because many times the sites they mention are nothing but blatant spam-harvesting applications, or even worse: Friendster knock-offs.

Now, I know it may sound snobby of me to be preferring some social networking applications — and subsequently valuing the opinions of users of such applications — over others, but there is a cardinal rule I discovered rings true to all great social networking sites: networking for the sake of networking is pointless. Give people something to do. In fact, some of the best social networking applications on the web do not actually have ‘networking’ at their core. Flickr, for example, is a photo sharing application which allows people to build connections based on photography. Last.fm, similarly, connects people through their music tastes. The important thing about both those sites is that users do not have to connect with others to enjoy the application; instead, it is through their interaction with ‘stuff’ (photos, music, etc.) that they end up interacting with others.

All that to say that recently, I’ve been playing around with a new application called Jyte. On first inspection, it really doesn’t seem like much: basically, you sign in with your OpenID (a post on how much I love OpenID to come soon) and then you vote to agree or disagree with the claims people make on the site. You can even make your own claims, and comment on other claims as well. Simple, right?

Well, the genius of Jyte is in its simplicity. Because of the simple action of agreeing or disagreeing with something, I can then easily find out that Jonathan Rascher and I seem to agree on many different things (quite possibly because we’re both stand-up agreeable guys) but there are a few things we don’t quite see eye-to-eye on. I can then engage with Jonathan Rascher based on our interests, ideas, and opinions, and also do this with a variety of like-minded and different-minded users. In essence, I’m interacting with a person’s jytes (or opinions on claims) instead of just simply with them for no reason at all.

Interacting with people through ‘stuff’ like photographs, music, events, and jytes is much more cerebral and intuitive than interacting with someone for the sake of social networking. And for that reason, Jyte has entered the social networking realm as a valid and effective player, and will probably hang around for quite some time.