I'm not sure if it tracks your playtime though (I think it does)
Which you can overload for your own amusement. When on my Windows machine, Steam friends see me playing Visual Studio 2013.
I too don't see the point of this. Gaming has expanded to the point where "a social network for gamers" is called "Facebook" or "Twitter." "A social network for core gamers" is called "Steam", and as it happens they are also printing money and making little money hats with the money they printed because holy shit that's a lot of money.
You can spend weeks strip mining randomly generated alternate universes and pumping their oceans of lava/oil through liquid tesseracts to power your base while you gather enough uranium and other resources to eventually put together a full scale nuclear reactor.
There are fully featured computers in the game with embedded lua interpreters and wireless networking so you can do stuff like build distributed power station monitoring software. There are also programmable drones called turtles, that can even be built to be self replicating.
There are blocks that mimic quantum properties that you can even use to do quantum teleportation between multiple servers.
Maybe, this is the social network aspect of steam, but for Playstation, Xbox, Wii etc.
I'm getting really tired of all this pessimism on HN. I wish pg would institute the "if you don't have anything nice to say stfu" rule.
I don't think it's for consoles; if it is intended for them, who's going to let them on their platform? What console manufacturers are going to let them into the hooks that PSN/Xbox Live reserve for themselves? It is in consoles' best interest not to allow cross-anything that they don't have to, and if it isn't in the system they're playing games on, its reason for existence is murky.