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  2. Social Networking sites for scientists are proliferating....

Social Networking sites for scientists are proliferating....

By clock on May 23, 2008.

There is Nature Network, there is Jeff's Bench, there is Facebook Scibook, Knowble.com is dead, and people are still building new social networking sites aimed at scientists. There is now SciLink (thanks Alex) and now also ResearchGATE (thanks Bertalan). I am joining everything and watching....one of these days, one of these will win. Nobody can guess which one (or perhaps more than one), but perhaps you can tell me which ones you like and dislike and why?

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That reminds me, get yerself on FriendFeed and join the Life Scientists room that Deepak set up. It's like Twitter only useful; at least with a small group it works really well for sharing info and brief conversations/observations.

I have pretty much settled on:

LinkedIn -- for "professional" stuff, people who could give me some kind of reference or for whom I could return the favor

Facebook -- for friends

FriendFeed -- for bio/open science info and conversation

In case anyone's interested, there's also Vox, OpenWetWare, The Synaptic Leap, LaboraTree and BiomedExperts. (Google will find those; if I link 'em the Borg spamfilter will eat the post.)

I shall try the FriendFeed. There are other sites, but they are discipline-specific so I did not mention them.

I also use LinkedIn for business, Facebook for friends, and also Dopplr for travel (i.e., who is there I can have beer with).

I think all these science-specific ones are doomed to failure. The real value of these is in network size and subfield representation. As bill says, for professional references and job leads. LinkedIn is way ahead on this and I don't really see anything being able to catch up.

Question: am I the only one to anticipate that six-online-degrees-of-Coturnix will be the next big game meme?

I think all these science-specific ones are doomed to failure.

Well, most of 'em will fail, or end up sidelined; that's just the web version of natural selection. I think, though, that one or two will go on to become as much a part of the everyday online landscape as blogs. If FriendFeed keeps scaling and responding to user input the way they are, my money's on them. I'm certainly finding them useful at the moment.

If y'all haven't heard about Academia.edu, check it out. It is another social networking site for scientists and the like. Think of it as a specialized Facebook. I remember something similar but the name doesn't ring a bell.