If the social networking space was like college, MySpace and Facebook would be the big men on campus. And naturally, lurking behind these beefy juggernauts is a clique of nerds—the niche social networks—and from chess clubs to history teams, these "90-pound weaklings" are quietly demonstrating the vast potential of social networking and showing how businesses can better utilize social networks for their employees.

The Users Come First; The Technology, Second

"Whether you're an athlete and play sports, or you're religious and you like to go to church, people want to coalesce around things that are culturally relevant to them," says Kay M. Madati, vice president of marketing at Community Connect, which owns five niche social networks.

In 1999, the company launched BlackPlanet.com, a social network designed for the African American community. Since its founding, the site has garnered around 18 million users and was recently declared by Hitwise to be the fourth most visited social network on the Web.

Madati says that BlackPlanet is careful not to add technology for the sake of it; they vet it first and make sure it's right for their users. The widgets they add to BlackPlanet pages are proprietary, developed solely for the site.

This contrasts a social network like Facebook, which opened its platform to third-party development in late May and has since seen an explosion of applications that has begun to clog people's homepages. Facebook has not monitored these applications all that closely, as evidenced recently by the creation of the "Secret Crush" widget.

"Clearly, the technology keeps improving and we want to keep up with it," Madati says. "But people come to our site because they can speak to people with similar interests and we add the technology to support that. We must stay true to that moniker."

Encouraging Accountability by Controlling Access

Users of MySpace and Facebook have been known to abuse the sites. Whether it be creating fake profiles or widgets that install malware on network member's computers, the site owners must then deal with the problem reactively. Due to their smaller size, administrators at niche sites can monitor user interactions more closely and ensure people follow the rules of engagement. As a result, the creators of these sites argue that users become more accountable for what they post and how they interact with the site.