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Tell us what we should develop next on Nature Network
Corie Lok
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 20:06 UTC
What new features do you want us to create for you on Nature Network? Post any ideas here. This is meant to be your site!
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First I should say that it is very exciting to have Nature backing a project with as much potential is this one! Hopefully I can provide you with some constructive comments.
Some of these have already been mentioned, but just for re-emphasis, there are some basic functions that I would make a priority:
1. Forum functionality: editing, moving, deleting, unhiding posts.
2. Messaging/email forms. Not all of us want to make our email addresses public, so what’s needed is an internal messaging system, or at least form that allows emails to be sent without revealing addresses.
3. Privacy settings, i.e. allow us to set what aspects of our profile are public/private.
3. More contact types in addition to friend/contact (colleague for example).
4. Automatic generation and ranking of ‘hubs’ based on activity of members from given locations.
5. Validation of affiliation: Facebook has a system that you could copy, whereby you can only be part of a given university network if you have a working email address hosted by that university. This is an important way to keep trolls out, and generally maintain a higher level of discourse than the average internet forum…
6. Better search… I think this has already been made clear by others.
For the longer term, here are some suggestions for how to make Nature Network relevant, useful, and innovative. Again, some of these ideas have already been touched on. And some of these ideas are probably fantasies for the time being.
1. Linking with PubMed/ISI for profile publications and discussion/comments on papers. Papers should each have a unique thread associated with them so that it is easy to find and contribute to discussion on a given paper. Perhaps this system could be started using only papers referred to in profiles, then expanded to all Nature papers, then to more journals over time…
2. Somebody suggested cooperating with Orkut (Google). A strategic alliance with a company who’s mission is to organize the world’s information would be beneficial in the long term for Nature. And it would be a benefit to scientists to have the involvement of a company with such expertise in data management as science increasingly moves online…
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Re. validation of affiliation using email addresses. I don’t think it’s quite that simple – remember that there are people in institutes as well as in Universities. Someone in an MRC institute may have an MRC email address even though they work in an institute deeply embedded within a University. Similarly someone may have an email address in a University domain and yet be an MRC employee.
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Not that simple, but still workable I would think. In fact, I’m one of those people that works at an MRC institute that is embedded in a university, and I have both an MRC and a university email address. So separate validation for each affiliation can be done, or in certain cases of institutions that are embedded, affiliation with one could be automatic if you are validated to be with the other.
A validation system does create some administrative overhead, but it doesn’t have to be very much. To take another hint from facebook, they recruit volunteers from institutions to sort out a lot of the details, such as compiling lists of departments/email extensions at the their institutions.
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Like Duncan, I’d like to see more locations—New York would be great! SF Bay Area too—for all the biotech people out there.
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I’d like to edit my profile to add my connotea ID and my geo-location.
As a group owner, I’d like to send some invitations to join the group (and not my own network).
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I second Pierre’s requests and the request for more local networks
Ability to add multiple email addresses, which people can use to find a person (much like LinkedIn does)
I am still not sold on the idea of Nature Network blogs yet. Seems to be somewhat redundant since people can easily add blog info to their profiles. Perhaps the ability to pull in RSS feeds into a users profile (9rules does that beautifully) would be cool)
A Nature Network badge/Widget
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Better internal support for events (at least let me enter events for locations other than Boston and London), including auto-generation of microformats, maps, timelines.
(Optional) support of linking events to external sites, e.g.: Nature Events ( http://www.nature.com/nature-events/ ), upcoming.yahoo.com, Google Calendar, confabb.com, hitchhikr.com etc.
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What should be the next local hub? We already have votes for NYC and SF Bay.
Pierre, you can already invite people to your group by clicking on the ‘send invite’ button on the group’s homepage. Unless I’m misunderstanding your request….
Great ideas everyone, keep ‘em comin’. I’m putting them on our list for the NN team to discuss.
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Hi Corie,
may be I was not clear or I’ve not found right button on the site: I wish I could send some invitation to join a group BUT NOT my own private network. I couldn’t see such a button on http://network.nature.com/group/bioinformaticsAs an example, I could send an invitation to only join the ‘biotinformatics group’ to Stephen Altschul , the creator of the BLAST algorithm, but I don’t know him and so I don’t want him to join my private network.
Pierre
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Pierre,
All members of a particular group should see the red “send an invite” button on the right-hand side of the group’s profie page. That allows them to invite people to the group. This is NOT an invitation to join your personal network. In fact, you don’t invite someone to join your network. You simply add them to your network by clicking on the ‘add’ link on their profile page. hope this helps.
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