I would strongly oppose integrating SaltW with Facebook in any way. Honestly it's kind of nice to have places on the web to get away from all that social network shit and just be with old friends, old school.
I do kind of like the idea of having a proprietary "like" system. I'm a bit leery of possible popularity contests, but maybe it will translate low-effort no-content posts that people are already writing into something more subdued.
Are there going to be staff writers, or what? Personally I wouldn't mind if there weren't any - if the site was just kind of a forums-based collaboration pool where great threads got "promoted" to featured content and were more visible. Of course, that brings up the whole issue of who decides what gets "promoted" or not - admins? The community by popular vote? We need to find a good system for that.
At its heart, GW was a community of creative people who enjoyed creating games, art, music, and writing, and I'd like to see that continued in SW. I'd like to see the frontpage filled with posts about projects people are working on, music and art they've created, collaborations, etc. Basically I envision a multi-blog or something where everyone writes cool stuff and discusses interesting topics and shares their neat creative projects.
Gaming World Forums
On the site's progress