MMO's and the like will of course have a fee. Actually I wouldn't mind an optional premium service in addition to the free one. Something like Xbox Live.
The thing about Gamespy is the lack of community -- Gamespy breaks it into many user-created servers, without some 'community' space (like the chatroom part of Battle.net)... sure, the B.Net chatrooms are full of idiots and adbots. But it's also a space to meet with people you know outside of games.
Well with the DS and pictochat, there might a potential for Nintendo to run and IRC channel for community. Besides, all these match making services run on some kind of IRC type protocol anyways, so its all possible to build community for Nintendo and still be free.
True, they could do something... they should. I've heard PS2 online games don't have a very good community system, though, while X-Box has a very good one... I was just hoping Nintendo community would be closer to B.Net than Gamespy (the PC matchmaking server-finder built into games, not Gamespy Arcade (the service with chatrooms, gamerooms, etc)).
Just because Gamespy is handling it doesn't mean it will be exactly like Gamespy on PC. I'm sure Nintendo has their own list of features they want implemented.
Web.archive.org, nice site... though it's always frusterating when they don't have the site (or the information on some site) that you want, when it's a site gone from the net now... (like the sites it doesn't have at all because they requested to not be on it)
The only question I do have is how the heck do you go about setting up the connection to a hotspot anyways. The hardware in the Nintendo DS seems to only have automatic connection via AdHoc connection as opposed to WiFi infrastructure connections in which you have to enter an SSID and a WEP password. I haven't had a chance to connect my DS to another DS to start and the instruction manual makes no mention of how to connect to hotspots.