I recently ran across this 15 minute clip of Clay Shirky talking about what he brilliantly refers to as the cognitive surplus and how that applies to things like Wikipedia and Web 2.0. It's an absolute must-watch

The analogy might seem odd, but read the blog post and bear with me and hopefully it'll make some sense. Lately, I've been noticing that the act of maintaining one's social network online is as ugly as the "MMO Grind" that makes so many quit MMOs.