Social Networking proposals

Question

Proposal: Building Social Networks

Does a proposal for a Social Network-related SE site make sense?

Reasons for my doubts:

• It's been tried three times before (Social Networking, Social Media Strategies, and Social Networking), each of which failed.
• There are already over 1000 questions covering this topic at Web Apps.
• There are already nearly 500 questions covering this topic at Pro Webmasters.

What will be different about this proposal?

Answer 1

Great question. Many of the questions I see on the SE network are not what I would consider expert social networking questions. Instead, they tend to be asked by people who appear to know very little about social networks, and some of those same questions could be answered by people who have simply used social networks.

Here is my original idea:

Proposed Q&A site for social networking experts to ask and answer questions about how to build social networks. It's also about how to train others on using social networks to build a community, spread a message, or market a product, using Social Networking tools.

After seeing the questions you've referenced, I believe this site may need a much narrower focus, excluding the basic questions about how to get more followers on my Facebook page and focus more on questions about engineering social networks and social networking platforms.

With that said, my main concern is that this may be too small of a niche to actually gather enough such experts to successfully power this site.

Thank you for asking the tough questions :)

UPDATE:

Examples of social networking experts we're targeting would be social networking platform developers, marketers, executives, and those with organizations who are expanding the field of social networking.

Ironically, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Dori, Rebecca Chernoff, Robert Cartaino, Shog9, the Stack Overflow developers, and a majority of the Stack Overflow staff would fall into this category of Social Networking Experts. The fact that one of these experts has major doubts about this proposal means that there is a very strong likelihood it will be closed, as the doubts are very real.

The question is, where can we find more of these such experts and build a community? The answer is most likely to be found on the social networks themselves.