It's not the tool, it's what you do with it. Indeed, there are many things about "web 2.0" that are ripe for abuse, but there are plenty of sites available that primarily serve the purpose of networking. Unlike Digg, which lets the masses decide what news is important enough to be read, there are sites like
last.fm which allows you to create a musical identity and find others who have similar tastes. From there, you can discover new artists that they listen to but you don't, meet new people, and so on. Recently, I also discovered
LibraryThing, which is sort of like last.fm for books. Very cool site (which happens to be down as of this writing). Then there's
LinkedIn which is vaguely like facebook for professional networking. Speaking of which, facebook isn't all that terrible either, provided it isn't used in an obnoxious manner. Even if it is, it's miles ahead of myspace: a feature for listing "top friends" had to be created by a third party and only people who want such a stupid feature will have it on their profile, and the facebook people refuse to allow the creation of audio widgets that autoplay on pageload.
It's not web 2.0 that's the problem, it's how we choose to use it, and I think there are plenty of options out there for people who want to seize the power of the internet to bring people together and spread culture.