This picks up on your previous post about friendfeed and Deepak's post . Deepak makes the point that "The Life Scientists are not scientists at all, but include librarians, techies with interests in science, etc." That covers the 'who'. As to the 'what' that was being discussed on friendfeed, it was primarily 'developments' - technical, research techniques, etc., and general news, events and queries. It was rarely about someone's research, and then not about the substance of the research but a query about a technique or relevant bit of information.

In this post you have made the transition to talking about communication not about these general topics that were the lifeblood of friendfeed but rather about scientific data or actual research, i.e. the one thing that people did Nottalk about on friendfeed.

To my mind a question arises -- why did people not talk about their data/research on friendfeed? Is it because friendfeed did not include a convenient platform for integrating scientific data? You seem to be implying or perhaps hoping that if the platform existed -- and you speculate about what the platform might look like -- people would begin to talk about their data/research on a 'friendfeed version 2'.

Another possibility is that the mix of Life Scientists who used friendfeed were not interested in using a forum like friendfeed -- which consisted of many non-specialists in their area of research -- for discussing their data/research, i.e. the audience was not right.

If these are the two main factors behind the the lack of discussion about data/research on friendfeed, then there should be hope that domain specific groups would adopt an appropriate platform -- friendfeed version 2 -- as a medium for discussing their data/research.

But there is another possible factor behind the lack of discussion about data/research on friendfeed -- that some or many people do not want to talk publicly or widely about their data/research until it is more developed/in a more presentable or defensible form. If this is the dominant factor then even platforms of the kind that you speculate about would not be sufficient to stimulate widespread friendfeed style discussions about data/research.

So, it would actually be quite interesting to find out more about the attitudes of life scientists who did not find friendfeed useful (i.e. the vast majority of them) -- why not, was it the audience, the nature of the discussions that were taking place, the limitations of the platform or a basic aversion to discussing their research in a public forum? Knowing more about the answers to those questions would go some way to providing a starting point for thinking about what a friendfeed version 2 with broad appeal might look like.

In your discussion you were primarily, it seems to me, coming at the issue from a technical perspective. The point I am trying to make is that it is equally important to look at the issue from a market perspective - i.e. what is it that people want or need? This is extremely difficult to do by posing questions about theoretical platforms that do not yet exist because most people will find the question too vague and/or not be interested enough to give a meaningful answer. But we might be able to get some insights into what people want/need by understanding their reaction to something which does exist -- i.e. friendfeed.