I've just found a "Web 2.0" service so utterly insane that it makes me want to smash myself over the head with a jam jar just to check that I'm not in a coma. 
It's called People2Pray and it is for "managing and sharing prayer requests". Yep, it's applying Web 2.0 buzzword fever - Ajax, tagging, folksonomy, APIs, gradient backgrounds, reflected logos, etc. - to the ancient practice of asking an invisible, undetectable being to break the physical laws of the universe in order to save your Auntie from her debilitating disease. Upon finding that she has recovered, you then thank this invisible, undetectable being for helping her (and try not to think about the doctors and nurses and medicines). In short, it's the biggest "fuck you" to the idea of cause and effect - and the most frequent instance of confirmation bias - that the world has ever seen.
Upon signing up, it seems that the founders of the website have spent too much time on talking to the almighty and not enough time figuring out how to do object-oriented ASP since I get a message informing me: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". Boom!
I manage eventually to get around this and then logged in. I can now make a prayer request - a simple matter of entering a title and a description. Me being a hell-bound atheist, I stated that my pussy cat has "a real bad case of the clap". I know, I'm horrible.
The rest is all kind of standard Web 2.0 fare - you can connect with friends and 'communities' (there are a number of churches and fellowship groups you can choose from), and you can share your prayer requests with them, or with the wider base of p2p users. Or you can keep them private (feline clap is definitely a 'private' one - as, no doubt, are the "more time to spend on AIM with Congressional pages" style prayers).
Once you've made a prayer request, you can edit, delete or archive it. What's really cool is that when you hit "archive", a box pops up which allows you to choose whether the prayer was answered! "Yes", "No" or "Other/Not Sure". I really hope the administrators of People2Pray make those statistics available to scholars. 
I've gotta say, People2Pray is a reasonably well-built site. The JavaScript isn't the most responsive in the world, but it's functional enough. The behaviour of the tag cloud is a bit odd too - I clicked on "postmodern" (because if you are going to go to church, you might as well go somewhere where jeans are acceptable), but nothing appeared. I guess I wasn't praying hard enough - or that God hasn't chosen to reveal himself to such a lowly atheist as myself.
Now, the only problem with the site is that it's based on a crazy premise. I mean, don't they know that prayer doesn't work?
