Oo, sorry to shout. But we’re excited to announce a couple of new features, the first of which we’re going to need a bit of help with.
Affiliation networks
Helps you find folk from your institution, and browse other institutions.
You’ll find this on your profile page. Go see.
When you enter an affiliation in your profile, that affiliation is now a link that takes you to a page showing all the other NN members listing the same affiliation (e.g. Imperial College). You’ll find people who have entered it as their current affiliation, as well as alumni of your institution.
Here’s where you come in. To kick things off, we used the affiliation information that NN members had already provided in their profiles.
There are many duplicates, for example ‘Imperial’ or ‘Imperial College’, or ‘Smith Lab, Imperial College’.
To help us consolidate this, please go to your profile and edit your affiliation. Make sure you show the full name (e.g. “University College London”, not “UCL”).
You should enter multiple affiliations separately, and don’t forget previous affiliations, so we can build alumni networks.
This is but a beginning. We will be rolling out more improvements over the coming months.
Your network snapshot
This old friend, found in the blue box on the left when logged in, just got an enhancement. You’ll now find a tabbed view that lets you track conversations you initiated or took part in – both in blogs and forums.
Meet the team
Oh, and you can also find out a bit more about the NN crew by visiting our new team page.
If you have any comments about the new features, you can email us at network at nature.com or post to our feedback forum.
Phew! Our next release will be in around a month, when you should get the first inklings about new local hubs. Stay tuned…
Nicely done! Looking forward to discovering the location of the new hubs now!
Yep, I like the tabs and particularly like ‘My replies’. I can almost cope with tracking things now. Are the times at the bottom of each item in the ‘My replies’ tab time of my last comment? Perhaps you could also put in time of the most recent comment in that thread?
Cheers guys – watch out for further improvements with the affiliations stuff.
On My Replies, the timestamp relates to the first reply since your own reply/comment. Maybe it would be more useful to make it the time of the most recent reply.
We’ve been told we should write the institute name as “MRC National Institute for Medical Research”. Will this link me into other MRC people as well as other NIMR people? I would guess not.
Frank – try it and see. You can always edit it again.
It should show you, in the main column, everyone else who typed in the affiliation in the same way. But in the right margin you will see a list of similar affiliations.
Integrating and consolidating these similar affiliations will begin with the next release, one month from now.
Frank (and Matt), I put down Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which I presume will match neither ‘MRC’ nor ‘LMB’? (Nor, indeed ‘Cambridge’?)
Yeah, it’s a tricky one this affiliation stuff – especially for institutions that have really long names. Suggest you put down whatever seems most sensible – in this case maybe MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
Oh, and clever location stuff should be introduced with the next release as a prelude to launching the new local hubs.
One slightly odd thing is that if you go back to My Replies then it defaults to the network snapshot rather than whatever tab you were in which is slightly disconcerting.
Good improvements! (Especially on following threads and replies and so forth.)
All good.
Here’s a funny url related issue that I stumbled upon via FriendFeed
Earlier today, for the first time I used tinyurl.com to shorten a link. (we don’t have such problems at NN)
Some smart-ass has recently come up with an utterly pointless converse, wideurl.com
I tested this out and http://news.bbc.co.uk/ got converted to (and it works) http://wideurl.com/aitch-tee-tee-pea-colon-double-slash-en-
ee-doubleyou-ess-dot-double-bee-see-dot-see-oh-dot-you-kay-
slash
As useful as a chocolate teapot but here’s evidence of my experiment.
Regarding the Your Replies tab available from this URL
Here’s my wish: can this specific service become available via an RSS feed as well? Tracking what happened after your comment would be easier.
Massimo
It’s a good suggestion, Massimo – and something we had considered but, for rather dull reasons, didn’t include in this release. I’ll see if I can get it featured in a future release.
Well done on the improvements that are there!
A note about RSS – turns out that each of the tabs (Your snapshot, Your topics, Your replies) DOES have its own feed. My mistake.
However, the snapshot feed has a bug for some subscribers at the moment. We’re hoping to fix that very soon.