In the old days people had huge lists of links to friendly sites. That was social networking without the middleman.

Let's bring back web rings.

We should totally do that! Can we snazzify them with some kind of javascript gimmickry please? Maybe some kind of websockets-based visualisation of other users whizzing round the ring?

Oh the nostalgia. My experience with web rings is most of the sites in them are turds. Maybe Google could build a machine learned web ring where you can shuffle through similar sites.