I do sympathize with Shag's sentiment, i.e., "... sitting in front a machine all day, writing, debugging, testing code, that i have utterly ZERO interest spending more time in front of it in the fucking evening." I was a SAS/UNIX/R programmer for nearly five years before graduate school.
My point was precisely that such applications can become politically meaningful under some circumstances. To give an uninspiring example, I have a Facebook account that I use for not more than ten minutes per day (I resisted opening one until Nov. 2008). It has mainly one useful feature, in my mind: sharing links. I post links that might be of interest to my leftist friends, and check out what links they have posted; I also post a link or two that might swing my more liberally inclined friends in the direction of good sense.
If Facebook can be put to good political use, it should be, I think. (Marx was right about the Luddites.)
epoliticus
-- "In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial ... the present year of course always excepted." -- A German refugee, circa 1867 --
http://epoliticus.wordpress.com/