Did any of the haters on this thread watch his TED talks? There's the one linked to in the article (from 2004), and another one Ze gave last year (http://www.zefrank.com/ted/2010.html).

Having watched "the show" back in the olden days before youtube, i'm convinced ze is a genius. He's incomprehensible to HN because he really doesn't care how it works, he only cares about how it's being applied.

It's all about the application of technology to make a human connection for him. His only metric is the quality of that human connection -- which is weird to people who care about clean design, or scalability, or neat javascript "fade" effects.