I have talked to my friend about this in the past but the hardest thing about open science is that there is no social network built around science and that the ones that do exist don’t allow for much room to play. Let’s take a quick look at what’s out there and what their drawbacks are:

• FriendFeed – to me this was the best of the social networks when it came to science. The live conversations were great and you could create rooms and groups and manipulate them at will. I would make a room to take live notes in and post them in my open notebook. The only drawback was that Facebook bought them and stole all the features to put into Facebook (somehow making Facebook worse at the time) and then seemingly left friendfeed for dead.
• Google+ – brand new and seems a lot like friendfeed. The biggest issue is that all posting to Google+ requires manual entry. I personally don’t have a lot of time to be posting all my notes to the Plus, so my activity there is minimal. But if they ever get that fixed I could see it surpassing friendfeed in terms of usability.
• Twitter – used a lot by a lot of people and I still don’t understand why. Tracking information around twitter is a mess and requires so much attention that it almost isn’t worth it. If information didn’t spread so quickly via Twitter I would despise the site (but not the people that follow me and that I follow!). Not only that but analyzing twitter traffic still isn’t up to par as I’ve discovered a lot in my notebook.
• Facebook – I really want to compare Google+ and Facebook, but you can’t. To me they are so different that it’s apples and oranges. Both are social places, but I refuse to use Facebook to post information because there is no way to filter to the right groups (yet). The Plus has circles which greatly helps in this regard. But Facebook allows me to make groups and pages and automate posting information to those places making that feature way better than the Plus.

I don’t really use anything other than those 4 so if someone out there has any information to add to what I just mentioned or uses something other than the big 4 let me hear it!

So with all that said, will there ever be a social site that is built around science? One of the hardest things for me (and others I suppose) is trying to find other open scientists and other open notebooks.

In ScienceBook (to be completely unclever) I imagine having a repository of open notebooks that makes browsing simple. There would be an RSS feed that shows the latest posts from all the notebooks and you can subscribe to whatever you want to pick and choose what you want to read.

But what else would be useful? Let’s get the conversation going here and keep it going in the scio12 session on Thursday at 1:30pm.