Yesterday, after a four hour flight and other activites, I found myself opening up Friendfeed on my iPhone and the entire front page was devoted to one topic, the acquisition of my favorite hangout by Facebook, not a place I consider a hangout (although I use it quite a bit to stay in touch with friends and family). There was, understandably, a lot of disappointment and a significant degree of concern among the user base, some to an extreme. I continue to be replaced by the knee jerk reactions of seemingly intelligent people in social networks (in both directions). The scientific community on Friendfeed on the other hand had a much more measured and nuanced response, as evidenced by Cameron’s wonderful blog post.
So what does it mean for The Life Scientists. This is a community near and dear to my heart. When I created the room, I had no idea it would get to where it is now, and I would like that community to thrive, whether it be on Friendfeed, a future evolution of Friendfeed or somewhere else. I think we have sufficient volume that we could actually move to another platform, but one thing would not be there, Friendfeed. The performance and quality of Friendfeed are top notch. There is a reason that Facebook acquired Friendfeed, or rather the team behind Friendfeed. For all of its flaws and seeming triviality Facebook is a haven for top notch engineering and fundamentally considers itself an engineering company (for anyone who doubts that just go look at Hive and Cassandra). So it is entirely possible that a Friendfeed like community can thrive within Facebook. How that happens is critical to whether the scientific community will stay on this platform or move on.
I’ve gone on record saying that a Facebook for scientists will not work. The network effects are just not there, nor is there a compelling reason to go to yet another site. I used Friendfeed because of the mix of science and tech I could enjoy there, and many of the members of The Life Scientists are not scientists at all, but include librarians, techies with interests in science, etc. That cannot be replicated on a general science site. Also the focus of those sites seems to be very much the research paper and formal research and those “restrictions” will make the kind of community we have Friendfeed difficult to replicate. Could Nature Network replace that? Perhaps, but not in it’s current form. The design and architecture are just not conducive. So is this an opportunity?
The Biogang was set up as a loose community of computational life scientists, and while today it is more of a loose grouping that hangs out on Friendfeed, I’d still like to see it becoming something more, almost what Edge tries to be, but is too pretentious to achieve. Not a group of people with big names, but a bunch of folks who care, and more importantly can do. An incubator of ideas and projects. Some day. But that’s a story for another day. But the people who inspired The Biogang are very much active on Friendfeed. Could we start a truly distributed project, maybe bringing in people from outside science (even some of the Friendfeed gang), to build a messaging and discussion environment that can becoming a thriving community? A site that accepts OpenID as a central identity system and leverages OAuth. Stack Overflow does a beautiful job of an OpenID centric system. The challenge will be sustaining it. As we found out with Bioscreencast, working on a site in your spare time is hard. On the other hand, we had only one real developer and it wasn’t a distributed open source project. If we could come up with a core team that drives the vision, it could serve as an example of how you can build a high quality framework. We have enough folks with Rails skills to proceed bootstrap something (it doesn’t have to be Rails, but using git and Heroku, we could deploy quickly). The size of the community, small, will mean scaling will not be an immediate challenge, but by using something like Heroku, we will be able to scale relatively easily (famous last words) and move to a different hosting environment if required without too much difficulty. Ideally, this could be done as a non-profit under Apache licensing. Nature, PLoS etc could be benefactors, although I am not sure they have the kinds of incentives that enable Facebook and Yahoo to be benefactors for a project like Hadoop. I am willing to set up the non-profit for this. It could also be coopted into a startup, hence the Apache license and the startup could provide the bulk of the engineering resources over time.
I am getting ahead of myself. What we shouldn’t do is develop a kludge, cause then after an initial flurry no one will come and interaction will decrease sharply. The kludge could be a half-hearted platform, or trying to shoe horn this community into a scientific social network or some other aggregation site. The reason Friendfeed worked was that it was implemented very well. On the other hand, if you get the people, even inferior implementations can succeed (Twitter), but I doubt we’d ever get the network effects to recreate that unique scenario. Cameron is right that in any general community the voice of the scientific community will always be strong, but I am not sure any of the current implementations and thoughts necessarily provide something compelling enough.
The question is, should we? Can we? Quite honestly, I don’t know.
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2 Comments
Hi Deepak,
Good post.
Building a great user experience is hard. friendfeed did it slowly (I remember joining just after it launched, a colleague of mine had been discussing building a personal feed aggregation platform for a few months, and we were both disappointed with the range of features available in the initial friendfeed offering, but they iterated and iterated and iterated) with considerable funding and a core of some of the best engineers on the planet. That's a reason to be caution about diving in and trying to rebuild what we are afraid we might loose.
The sense I get from your post is that the driver behind the adoption of ff by the life scientists was the new interaction model that it provided to support discussion. In the case of the scientifically minded discussing ideas openly is the lifeblood of what we do. The fear is that this experience will be impacted by the acquisition.
My feeling is that the real-time web is just beginning. We are all drinking the cool-aid, look at the interest in Google Wave. It's new and exciting, and shiny. In 18 – 24 months it will begin to be a javascript library that you can invoke on your own personal web page/blog embed in phone app. (well, maybe not exactly like that, but trending in that direction).
I think there are strong reasons to be optimistic. The people in the life scientists room will still all be there, still all be interested in having conversations, hell, there are damn sight more people out there who would love to participate if the technology would only filter out to them.
We are still sitting on the coal face. No need to worry too much if it turns out that we just need to open a new mine shaft.
Ian
Wonderful comment. I am not worried at all. I see opportunities everywhere and this, if approached the right way is certainly one. I am not leaving Friendfeed, not unless it decays or goes into directions totally anathema to my interests, and I am half as cynical as most. At the same time, I do believe we have enough people out there who can build stuff and it would be an interesting proof of concept, of an idea that's been in my head for a couple of years. We'll see. If we do go that route, should be fun.
That continuous, iterative development models is one of the lessons I take to heart. It's what has made FF so good. Always iterating.