ivan boothe said:

I think the more useful function is connecting people to each other, empowering them with information and allowing them to have conversations among themselves and within their (offline) communities.

That to me is the key point. I disagree though with your statement:

As for discussion fora: I think they're the black holes of the Internet. I haven't seen a robust "forum" since the days of widespread newsgroup use.

I don't disagree here for the sake of arguing, I want to make a point that links forums to your goal of connecting people.

There are many thousands of forums that have over a thousand active members, but they are almost always very focused on a narrow topic. Many of those create real world person to person connections. But the forum has to reflect an existing base of people that are foused on that one area and who otherwise would like to connect.

My favorite example is the many hundreds of local forums for fishermen. Even in my smallish area there are two forums with each over 1000 active members, just for local fishing, and I know of many hundreds more throughout the country. Yet, attempts to create national fishing forums to link fishermen around the country have for the most part been a complete bust.

More people fish than do any other sporting activity, there are many of fishing magazines with nationwide subscription bases, but when it comes to people getting together to share information and interact people clearly prefer local forums. I am not aware of single fishing blog, and even if there were one, I cant think of a single reason anyone would use it.

Remove the word fishing and replace it with another hobby or interest and you will find similar results but the results will vary based on how people like to intersect and if the the community is really local or organically national. Rock climbing - there are lots of local forums but the national ones with local sections do better. Poker - there are some forums that are country specific but many more that have thousands of active members but have no geographic focus. Even the suport forum for the software we use to run our business has probably well over 1000 members that actively use it to share information - it would be useless if it was just people reporting problems and not staying to help others with their problems, but people do stay. There are local user groups now popping up to be additions the the software forum.

I could go on, but I agree 100% with the idea that the goal should be to create real and usefully connections. I stick by my view that there is a demographic shift to more of a messaging culture for those under 25, but that there are a lot more active online communities that prefer forums and discussions.

I just want to accomplish my goals, and I don't really care what works as long as I can identify it. My gut is that existing social networks are failing at the goal of efficiently creating action oriented connections (as opposed to message oriented), but I admit it may be because I dont use them well.

My gut also tells me that one of the big reasons these networks fail is that they are too general. Just like national fishing forums have failed, if we want to create web based communities that are active on social topics I think we need to create communities that are more local, perhaps not geographically, but local in the sense of being a community for just one cause.