Social sites have become extremely popular among users but have they
attracted equal attention from the research community? Are they good only for
simple tasks, such as tagging and poking friends? Do they present any new or
interesting research challenges? In this paper, we describe the insights we
have obtained implementing CourseRank, a course evaluation and planning social
system. We argue that more attention should be given to social sites like ours
and that there are many challenges (though not the traditional DBMS ones) that
should be addressed by our community.