Battle.net, xbox live, steam, gamespy. They all have one thing in common. They're more of a pain in the butt than they should be. Ideally multiplayer would work like it did in the past. You get into your game, click multi, list servers.. pick one and play. There's no need to make these middleware "services" in your face. If I want to social network I'll go somewhere like facebook or any of the multitude of competing sites to do it.
The only value these things add is value for the company selling it in the form of copy protection. Otherwise, it's simply a roadblock to having fun with the game you just bought.