If you are busy building a professional career and want things to get done, it’s time to forget MySpace, Facebook or any other social networking 1.0 sites, that are focusing on friendship, love, spam whatever with a general membership. What you need is social networking 2.0, which is based on the special profession you’re in, or is centered around a special topic. Ning, for instance, is a tool for creating your own social network for anything specifiable.
For the business and technology (mostly IT) sector LinkedIn is a more and more frequent destination. And, at last, there is a social networking starting point for every English-speaking (natural) scientist called the Nature Network (NN), which went global in February, after 7 testing months in the local hub Boston. It is still in Beta, just like all good “web 2.0 and more” apps.
First, I was informed about the plan of Nature Network Global from a comment of Corie Lok, main editor on NN, in the comment section of a Nature Blog in January. Corie was kind enough to share with me some recent initial stats on NN: We have more than 1800 registered users. When we relaunched in mid-February, we had 400. We’ve been growing steadily since February by about 100 to 150 new users registering every week. We’re now at about 100,000 total page views across the whole website. We had about 20,000 in February.
According to the numbers, Nature Network is currently a very small but organically growing strong online community. This is exactly the most exciting period in the life cycle of every forming network, so it is a guaranteed experience and challenge to join and participate – now at least – for people like me, who are eager to test and modulate every flexible beta product.
To get the key parameters and shed light on the prospects standing before NN, I’ve made the following table, which is a comparison of NN with relative and rival professional networking site LinkedIn:
As Gavin Bell neatly summarized the core architecture and aims of NN while writing on Nature Network Boston launches: “Some of the key features of the site are the groups, which allow individual communities to have their own spaces within NNB. Read the rest of this entry »
