This ning thing

I used to be a member of a few anime and manga networks pre-2005, but I found that people who are really into anima or manga are almost the exact same on the internet as they are in real life... Currently, I'm a semi-active member of Silverfishlongboarding.com. I would say very active member, but unlike many people in online forum/discussion communities, I don't post just for the sake of seeing myself on the internet. So while some members of the forum have 1000+ posts, I have a little over 100 and I've been on the forum for a year.

This is what I find to be an interesting part of social networks, especially ones that focus themselves around discussion forums. Post-counts, in some places, seem to indicate how active you are as a member, but only reflect the quantity not the quality of your posts.

As far as appealing social networks, I like longboarding, so anything related to that could be interested... as long as it is populated by mostly helpful people. I also like the idea of a Library Web 2.0 social network, and a cooking social network. I especially like finding new recipes because I like cooking and being able to contact the author of the recipe to ask for clarification would be pretty useful... come to think of it, if there were an origami network where one could contact the author of a page it would be very useful for clarification.

Overall, I like what ning offers. As long as you can drum up enough support it shouldn't be too hard to create something useful.