I have to admit, Y! Answers makes me proud. It's became a social network even before the team even released Network feature — you know, where you can add a friend or become a fan.
How? Because it's a "place", a destination for the Answers addicts to share thoughts, opinions and the cold, hard facts! A lot of relationships were born just by asking, answering and discovering, w/o the need to 'befriending'.
Building people connections (see digg.com's new social feature and mash.yahoo.com) can build your corpus of users, but it might not bring together a solid, like-minded community.
Social networking is not all about the number of connections you have, the number of folks in your network.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken! =PLabels: socialsearch, yanswers