In my early analysis on Nature Network I compared it to LinkedIn, the social networking site of technology and business professionals, based on the Business 2.0 coverage of LinkedIn.

Now I’d like you (already NN users) to ask about your inviting habits in the form of a question: Would you like to invite your supervisor to Nature Network?

And the rationale behind comes also from the comparison with LinkedIn habits: "Hoffman and Guericke knew that. What they tried to do was make LinkedIn both as easy and as unobtrusive as possible. Your friends may nag you to join Friendster or MySpace, but nagging doesn’t work very well in the business world.

The mechanism at LinkedIn that overcame that obstacle is very simple: Anyone can join, but to make someone else a part of your network, you have to invite them and they have to accept. And whom would you rather invite to your network, someone who ranks below you in the work world or above?

“You are more likely to invite up than down for your own network,” says Guericke, LinkedIn’s marketing VP. "That’s only natural, but what that does is keep the quality high on LinkedIn. We wanted it to be a place where people you think highly of can be found. It might not be Steve Jobs, but it will be other senior people at Apple (Charts) who you might want to know.""

So let’s transfer this thought to fellow scientists: The basic line of invitation to NN currently is probably the invitation of people in the same rank (grad to grad, postdoc to postdoc) and fewer invitations are sent to people higher in the academic hierarchy than of the invitator. But in order to make NN an everyday and useful web destination it would be advisable to invite academic people from every chronological age and hierarchical level.

What could be the obstacles: too much transparency and visibility, web ignorance, even illiteracy in some cases. These obstacles can be overcome, of course.