I’ve been collecting novelty social networks lately because I’ve been working on one of my own (because who wants to start a blog network these days?). Since I have a passion for both interesting words and fine beer, Wordie and Coastr have received most of my affections.

Wordie is surprisingly fun. Like many people, I heard about this “Flickr for words” last month and thought it was ha-ha-silly. Then I spent two hours adding and discovering words and started eyeing my bookshelf for virgin verbiage. This site is wholly addictive. And unlike some other linguaphile sites (a word I learned on Wordie), not even remotely pretentious. Words I’m proud to say I was first to Wordie so far: netop, bialy, Joycean. What do you got?

Coastr is Wordie for beer nerds. You add the beers you like and the places you like to drink them, then find other users who share your tastes and see what other beers they like. You can review beers and beer establishments and the more you contribute, the higher your Coastr “score” becomes and presumably your clout.

I’ve been having fun listing my snobby beer preferences on Coastr but I can already tell that the userbase is lacking. I was the first person to add Brooklyn’s Spuyten Duyvil as a venue, for example, and every beer-geek in the New York metropolitan area reveres the place. And if you’re used to Beer Advocate-style beer reviews, you may be disappointed with the content. Still, it’s a fun, well-executed site that I identify with and am interested in helping grow—and inspiring that feeling is basically the goal of a novelty social network.

In addition to words and beer, I’m big into books, and there are lot of bookish community sites out there: LibraryThing, BookMooch, FrugalReader, What’s On My Bookshelf?, Shelfari and others I haven’t heard about yet. None of these do it for me right now but Shelfari looks the most likely to.

Key to the success of all these sites is a place for users to curate: a homebase with a short URL. The more customizable you can make that user profile page the better; it’s up to you whether or not you want to let your site tip over into the anarchic MySpace direction.

And key to the success of novelty social networks is simplicity. Neither Wordie nor Coastr have “take a tour!” links or “how it works” pages. You can easily figure out how they work by clicking around, because what they do isn’t that complicated.