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Science and Social Networking: can it work?

Scientific social networking sites are popping up all over the place, but are …

Social networking. It's bigger than porn, they say. People are attempting to capitalize on this fact in various ways, and sites targeted at the scientific community seem to be springing up all the time. We've had a look at some in the past, which have ranged in motive from the humanitarian to the profit-minded, but it's difficult to know how successful they are. is a new entry into the market. From poking around on the site, it seems to be fairly similar in content to Labmeeting, another new arrival. The idea is that you can register a profile, find collaborators, and share results on the site.

The trouble is, almost none of the users on the site have actually filled in profile data, making it impossible to locate someone with a common interest. I was unable to find a single user from any of the institutes or universities I've been at, nor any from a number of other large research universities. Nor did there seem to be much in my field of work (cardiovascular disease, which is hardly a niche field). It's also not as polished as Labmeeting, and the UI is certainly fussier.

Ultimately the fate of any social networking site is determined by its user base, and I think it's here that most of these endeavors will struggle. Many PIs and senior scientists can be remarkably technophobic at the best of times, so getting them to buy in to the general concept will be an uphill struggle. Then there's the problem of attracting user to any individual site. Since these sites are all multidisciplinary, you're going to need a fair number of people working in each field to sign up for it work. Nature Networks has the name of one of the two must-read journals behind it (with all that means for reach and brand awareness), but newcomers to the scene will have a lot of work to do.

Finally, there's the concept of sharing data online with other scientists. As far as I know, we've had this ability for as long as we've had the Internet. Researchers email each other data all the time. I've used Flickr to share microscope images and my iDisk and ftp sites to disseminate data files and manuscripts, and I'm hardly unique. What I don't really understand is he attraction of posting data on a public site for all to see, pre-publication. Maybe that's just because I've been scooped twice, but science right now is a cut-throat business; funding can't be taken for granted, as the tale of Douglas Prasher (who was instrumental to yesterday's Nobel Prize) demonstrates.

It's possible that a science-specific social networking has a killer application that neither I nor the rest of the NI staff has identified. If so, maybe one of our readers can clue us in. 

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