Comments on: Scientists Socializing Online

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:33:14 +0000

I was on the team of the original ChemWeb.com community, and the BioMedNet.com team come to that. This is more than a decade ago during the so-called web 1.0 days. At the time, we boasted 250k and 600k members respectively and repeat visitor rates and logins demonstrated that those two sites were enormously active, far more so than any supposed web 2.0 science community. Indeed, on sheer numbers and interactions ChemWeb was actually ahead of the American Chemical Society at one time. Such a shame the publishing giant that bought it off the original developers decided they weren’t getting a decent RoI, it would be web 3.0 by now if it had been maintained.

Incidentally, Chemweb.com still exists and at this very moment I am writing a news report for my Alchemist column on the site!

By: Brian K

Brian K — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:01:40 +0000

@david And that’s why I actually visited the sites to determine what all of these “users” are doing, and the answer is, not a whole lot.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 07 May 2009 07:13:26 +0000

@Brian As you have pointed out. Alexa, Compete and all those other external “analytics” systems generally are inaccurate. They rely on users having reached a particular site via a particular search route. In the case of Alexa this is via the Alexa toolbar/addons or via Amazon’s A9 system (of which Alexa is part, I believe). I always assumed they were very inaccurate for niche sites because who in science, for instance, actually runs the Alexa toolbar? Whereas in the wider world there will be a relatively large clutch of lay users who have been persuaded to install that toolbar. Only a site’s raw access logs can give a true picture of visitors rates. Even Google Analytics, AWStats, GetClicky are flawed…

By: Brian K

Brian K — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:55:21 +0000

SciLink has 44,000 registered users but its Alexa rank is abysmal. I’m not saying Alexa, compete, or any of those are very accurate (they underestimate my page views per month 100-fold), but you’d think with 44,000 users they’d have a better rank than me…

To dig a little deeper, those 44,000 users comprise a little under 100 groups on the site. The largest group has 11 members… Doing some really tough math, I can surmise that those 44,000 users aren’t very active.

The last event entry was for sept. 2008…

It seems to be the trend in this sector to vastly over-estimate usership. Researchgate does the same thing. I read their blog every once in a while (and twitter) and they talk about the Thousands of users a day they have on the site. If you look in their groups, there are two or three with recent posts, mostly by the same 5 people. What are the other 1,000+ users doing there? Using their “symantic search?” Right.

I realize this post you made is almost 6 months old, but I had some free time today to catch up on SNfS stuff :P

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:40:17 +0000

I think that’s exactly right Mitch. Look at twitter, dead simple compared other platforms like Pownce and Plurk and apparently by far the most active, effective, and well-known. It’s the message, not the media.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:11:13 +0000

It’s rather interesting reading through your comments section about the future of scientific social networking. I don’t like giving away my secret recipes for having productive and active communities, but the answer to growth and sustainability is the simple SEO Google slogan, “Content is King”. All the cool features, tweaks, and programs will get you nowhere if the major content generators start incorporating similar features. Advantage will always be towards content, prove me wrong at your own peril.

Mitch

By: Microsoft Chemical Team Blog : The Social Media for Scientists Conversation Continues…

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:10:11 +0000

[...] to drift away from the blog for too long as conversations roll on without me. David Bradley posted a nice follow-up piece on social media for scientists that is creating some good [...]

By: Brian Willson (Microsoft)

Brian Willson (Microsoft) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:59:54 +0000

David (Crotty), thank you for the link to Richard Gayle’s post. It’s an interesting read with some good data points. One hurdle to attracting more “business sector” scientists to the social networks is access. Access to the popular networking sites is typically not allowed from a work asset – either by policy or by technology making it hard to attract that group. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it typically isn’t an endorsed or approved scenario. Maybe the sites mentioned on these posts see things different. They may see more business sector participation because they’re not “general purpose” and they offer specific value in return.

Anyway, really good discussion…I’m learning a lot.

By: Victor Henning

Victor Henning — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:49:53 +0000

Thanks David [Crotty]! In short, our business model is “freemium”: At some point in the future, we’ll introduce premium features in addition to the free ones. Everything that’s free will always stay free, and more advanced functionality will be made available to power users for a (very reasonable) monthly subscription fee. These premium features could be, for example, more detailed research statistics or custom statistics queries; less/no restrictions on sharing, upload space for documents, or group management tools; more detailed/custom recommendations once our recommendation engine is up and running; more functionality in Mendeley Desktop etc.

If you look at the more business- and work-oriented social networks like LinkedIn or Xing (in Europe), this model has worked very well for them. More to the point, we don’t see ourselves primarily as a social network, but rather as software with leverages the respective strenghts of the desktop and the web – and the “free version/premium version” model has obviously been around in the software industry for a long time.

By the way, I’ll be in New York from around the 3rd December and then make my way up to Boston until the 10th December. Now, CSH is on the other side of the Long Island Sound, but if you’re in NY and would be interested, I’d love to meet up for a quick chat and a coffee?

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:53:48 +0000

Congratulations Victor, glad to hear it and looking forward to following your site as it continues to grow. Curious though, could you share a summary of the business model for Mendeley with us? It seems a tough nut to crack, even the biggest social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook don’t seem to have much of a way of making money, other than trying to sell ads. Is there a better way to monetize a social networking site for scientists that most of us have missed? I know Sermo has an interesting business model, and SciLink appears to be doing well selling services outside of its social network. Any others?