ScienceOnline'09: Social Networks for Scientists

The final session of the day I attended was on social networks for scientists. As someone who has not embraced most social networks (exceptions being LibraryThing and LinkedIn), and recalling David's intro of BiomedExperts during a reference meeting last year, I was interested to see if the general audience felt that networks specifically for scientists were beneficial or redundant, and how/if they might be useful to our faculty, students and librarians. Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh did a great job framing the discussion.

• Facebook helps people find people
• scientists need to find people therefore it obviously follows that scientists need Facebook
• so...people want to build a "Facebook for scientists"
• quick room survey exposes that some people use science-specific social networks but almost entirely Nature Network
• two issues in usefulness for any social network: critical mass and features
• Facebook was built around a pre-existing community (Harvard undergrads) but people tend to forget
• Twitter is standout network that launched on the world without a pre-existing community
• myExperiment paid people to put stuff on site
• FriendFeed is relevant for filtering; if people like/comment that item keeps coming to top
• also useful for finding people with expertise
• FriendFeed pulls in *everything* friends do online, so recipe for disaster: blog, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, etc.
• Nature Network more like a group of scientists socializing than a social network for scientists
• fatal flaws I: social networks rely on network effects; no members means no network; if I arrive and no one else is there why come back?; must provide up front value - solve a problem I know I have
• only a few of the current offerings do this
• social networks have histories going back to usenet days
• serendipitous discovery on Google extremely useful
• do we need social networks for scientists or just use existing such as LinkedIn?
• CiteULike, Connotea do something better for scientists than Delicious
• several people use FriendFeed to find others' CiteULike
• branding as MySpace-like or Facebook-like for scientists backfired
• may not need to know you have a problem but still needs to solve; barrier for most people is need to do something
• fatal flaws II: scientists not very social; looking for solutions, not people; data finds data, people find people
• five guidelines for online services:
  1. tool must solve problem and solution must fit what you're doing
  2. tool must outperform existing tools
  3. must be near 100% reliability
  4. provide at least one killer feature
  5. prepopulate
• need to be able to take data out when you want to leave or network shuts down
• site also can't claim copyright on your data/input/contributions
• BiomedExperts did a good job of prepopulating using existing connections via literature citations
• Ravelry for knitters, crocheters
• very much like science in that people connect via materials (yarns) and how they are used
• not necessarily connecting around people, but yarns, patterns, etc.
• large number of people, small number of items and agreed upon way of talking about - but this is not true for science/scientists