Social Science

It is understandable that entrepreneurs go for the most lucrative markets first. You expect that the first mass produced cars will be positioned for the average consumer, rather than for the "25-30 year old left handers whose names begin with A-D" demographic. Likewise, when the famous bank robber Willie Sutton was asked "Why do you rob banks?" he supposedly replied (he denied this in at least one later interview), "Because that's where the money is."

Of course Facebook and MySpace et al. appeal to the great mass of younger, computer savvy consumers. In the US alone, that target market is many tens of millions of potential users. Instead, just to pick an example off hand, let's contemplate the scientific community. How big is that? Certainly at least an order of magnitude smaller; maybe two or more orders of magnitude smaller.

Those facts of life do not prevent some entrepreneurs from trying to serve a niche market better. In fact, the "academic" market has some social networking sites available to it.

For example, Swivel is designed for sharing data and graphs. The graph options are relatively simple though, and certainly there is no army of programmers dreaming up new options for Swivel users.

Another academic networking site is CiteULike, which is designed to let academics post and tag journal articles. But it requires that each journal article be posted one at a time, and does not accept input from popular citation library databases like EndNote.

These options available to scientists are modest; some might say paltry. Of course there are numerous listserv like entities, for the most part manned by volunteer labor, serving the academic community. I help with one of these myself, called ELMAR. But the truth is, most of these sorts of platforms are about 15 years behind something like Facebook.

In my next blog entry, I will write up my wish list for social networking sites for academics. Do you suppose some entrepreneur will think about serving this niche?