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I think the content consists largely of getting as many people as possible to be your "friend" and those lists of friends.

It depends on how you use it. All these sites could be what you describe. I only add people I know, and I've only talked to people I know. That's past tense, because I've pretty much given up on the site. I don't think that avoiding ads will improve it. It still has a terrible interface.

I've signed up for Orkut. First impressions are that the initial things holding back this site are the name (it's doesn't exactly roll off the tongue) and the look. It appears that you can't change the look of your page. This is both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand you won't see any of those "eye-bleeding" pages. On the other hand, you have to constantly stare at that ugly blue-ish, purple-ish color. And I'm sure the name will change soon, once they start making a bigger deal out of the site. They'll probably make it something extremely clever...like Google Communities.
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Matt