I used to be convinced that the niched social networks would be so strong that they would provide serious competition to the big players (that's why I founded Probook.ca).  Lately I feel like you can't find any news about networks with less than 10 million users or with anything other than a general purpose.  If the niched networks are thriving, they're not getting much media attention.

I wonder how the smaller niched sites will ultimately cope with the competition from the big players, or even how they're coping now.  All of the bigger sites let users network over more niched topics, through groups and applications, and they have the one big selling point: your friends are already on them.

I only really use the big sites, so I took to the streets (read: my Facebook friends) to find out what else they use.  Of course, there are tons of other sites, so if I've left out your favourite site please let me know.

I found a bunch of interesting hobby sites.  SwitchFly is a network for fly fishing enthusiasts.  For lovers of cars, there's CarDomain.  If you consider loving your dog a hobby (which lots of people do), there's Dogster.   For dancers, there's The Inter Mission.  For chess players, there's Chess.com.  For those who like to develop open-source software, there's Advogato.

There are tons of social networks for music lovers and book lovers alike.  Jesse Stay recently wrote an article about Amazon's social network, but there's also aNobii and LibraryThing.  If music is more your style, you might like SoundPedia or MOG.  If you're going to be travelling, you'll need some good books and good music, but you'll also need to know where to go.  That's why there are Travbuddy and Travellerspoint.

In my studies, I found myself drawn to Cake Financial and Zecco, social networks for investors.  Also, as a sports fan, I couldn't help but check out Fanspot, the “MySpace for sports” and Fannation, which focuses instead on news aggregation and stat tracking.  Being a law student, Lawyrs.net, the professional network for lawyers, piqued my interest as well.  Lawyrs may not be as useful to the world as Sermo though, the network that allows licensed physicians to share their knowledge.

I'm sure I've left a ton of sites out, so I encourage everyone to post their favorite smaller, niched network in the comments below.  Also, if you hate this article and want to complain, you can do so at VentBox: the social network for chronic whiners.