Apologies again for being so silent these last couple of weeks. I was in Nature’s London office last week leading up to Thanksgiving, meeting with members of the Nature Network team and we’ve been busy with 2008 planning.
We have all sorts of ideas on the table for new features to improve the website and to make it easier for people to connect with others sharing their interests. We’re in the midst of redesigning our homepage and the network snapshot page. We’re also talking about how we’re going to launch the next local hubs on Nature Network!
Let me open this up for discussion. What improvements and new features would you like to see on Nature Network? Which new cities would you like to see here? Please post feedback and suggestions here. Much of our ongoing development is very much driven by user feedback!
Some ideas:
Some ideas…
Pierre
Many conferences occur at locations that are not Nature Network hub cities. I have seen groups specifically created on NN for conferences, but those rarely receive attention. It would be nice to have “temporary” hubs focussed on conferences. My wish list would start with: SFN, EB, ASCB, SDB, AACR, ARVO. That would be an easy list to expand … Perhaps even a section of Nature Network devoted to conferences would be useful, perhaps a top-level tab. Hey, you could link in those restaurant reviews ;)
Would be nice to be able to set up votes / polls.
An API, so as developers can create useful things like Firefox extensions, mashups etc. Look at the Boost for FaceBook extension or the del.icio.us extension and imagine that applied to NN. It would rock. The closed nature of NN is a real barrier to usage.
Local hubs – great! Asia/Pacific or Aus/NZ please.
Oh yeah – secure login. NN passwords seem to be transmitted as clear text?
What Neil said. Less red :)
API would certainly be a great feature. Neil hit most of the buttons in his replies.
oh yeah, Creative Commons licensing…
Some of this has been mentioned above – Ability to see all the entries I have made, rather than “You have no recent entries to display.” Faster search. Ability to enter an event that takes place in any location (which I may have said before, but I can’t find my previous posting…) Option to enter regular HTML instead of current non-standard format.
For all of the above, consideration of mashing up rather than re-inventing, e.g. use Google Maps, Yahoo Upcoming etc., just integrate it with Nature Network.
A way to declare what you would be willing to collaborate on and a way to search for these possible collaborations . Example: Who would be interested and have the skills to test protein interaction predictions on a particular topic of cell biology and is a contact of someone I already know that could introduce me.
would be nice to have an rss feed for activity so i can see blog posts from within network and see comments on blogs too.
All great ideas everyone. Keep ‘em coming! Some are already on our list, some we are working on, but some are new ideas.
As John Wilbanks said, without question, Creative Commons Licenses.
Check out this great video
I’ve got a great idea! How about tracking the sites we visit and movies we rent and papers we read, and sell that info to advertisers!
More seriously, an activity feed would be useful.