This early ’90s AT&T concept video of an interactive “computer sous chef” has been making the viral rounds this week – but aside from being a giggle, there’s actually a pretty interesting takeaway here. Namely: When was the last time you used a cookbook?

One of the great things about social media is its ability to bring folks in niche communities together over shared topics, whether it’s a broad interest like cooking or sustainability (that’s one of the reasons we launched our newest community site, SunflowerHorizons.com), or something significantly less widespread or more geographically spaced out. Into historical reenactment? Suddenly it’s easy to connect with fellow hobbyists, a collective that’s fairly sizable but spread out across the country. Want to get in touch with other folks who are into, say, antique sewing machines? That’s easy too, even though you’re dealing with a fairly small group of enthusiasts. (I know this from experience; it wasn’t in my shortlist of hobbies, but when someone gave me an old machine a few years ago after I mentioned I wanted to make some curtains, the social Web helped me find the one guy – in American Samoa, no less – who could get me the vintage part I needed to get the thing going again. As a result, I sew a lot now. Just don’t ask how those curtains turned out.)

But back to cooking, and that funny AT&T concept vid. When I went off to college, my mother gave me an old ring-bound Betty Crocker cookbook from the ’50s as a sort of survival kit; it’d been her grandma’s, and its tattered, crumb-encrusted pages did a pretty good job of explaining everything from a boiled egg to baked Alaska, complete with bygone-era photos of happy housewives pulling perfect cakes out of the oven without singeing their curls or pearls. (Seriously. Not much of an exaggeration.) I’ve still got the cookbook, but instead of gathering crumbs on the kitchen counter, it’s gathering dust on the bookcase – these days, it’s easier to just open up the laptop and head to something like Allrecipes.com. And while the laptop doesn’t quite have the smooth-voiced charisma of the mythical AT&T sous chef, it gets the same job done, down to the part where the guy in the video sends his wife a text message while she’s at the store.

Thing is, AT&T didn’t quite twig to the issue of Too Many Recipes – what happens when I want to make biscuits and gravy, but can’t decide between the 500 or 5,000 or 50,000 recipes that Google retrieves for me? And that’s where social media is a perfect match for cooking. Consider a site like Foodily, which taps into your Twitter and Facebook connections to help you rank recipe results based on name and ingredients (or excluded ingredients). Suddenly, that biscuits and gravy search is a little less daunting, and if one of those recipes is accompanied by a testimonial from someone you actually know, you’re golden. And, hopefully, so are your biscuits.

Oh, and Foodily picked up a $5 million investment prior to its launch this February – suggesting that it’s not just social-savvy chefs who see the value of social media lighting up every niche on the Web.

What about you? Each of us has a handful of off-the-wall, obscure interests or hobbies – how has social media helped you delve deeper into those interests and maybe even meet like-minded folks in real life? Let us know in the comments.