Social Networking for Scientists

If somebody said social networking was all about finding a new date and throwing virtual pies at each other, think again. Of course, social networking sites are dominated by folks who do things like these, but is there space on such sites to discuss other things? You know, everyday topics like nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and Chaos theory?



Scientists have long been stereotyped as extremely private individuals, holed up in their labs researching the next big world saver or world destroyer (depending on whether you're talking about Dr. Strangelove or Q) all day. The guys at Labmeeting seem to think they'd like to meet colleagues and share their work.

After all, Mark Kaganovich is not one to all for these stereotypes. A Harvard graduate student with degrees in Biochemistry and Computer Ccience, set out to two years ago create Labmeeting - a meeting place that allows scientists and students to easily upload stacks of papers, protocols, and notes in their offices that they pass around as PDFs, organize them, search them, and share them. Scientists can create groups, and invite other members of their labs to create a common repository of papers that can be accessed from anywhere. Each scientist has his own profile page and can recommend papers to colleagues, mark them up, create collections, and follow what other scientists are collecting.

Although Labmeeting is free for individual scientists and students at the moment, Kaganovich eventually plans to charge a subscription fee to corporate users such as drug and biotech companies.