What is the future of the social networking site that focuses on professionalism?

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There is a Web site that focuses on professional communication, not interaction between friends and relatives, and caters to the needs of different professional audiences, where you can find people or ideas to help you solve problems. There are already some social networking sites that have yielded results.

Richard Savas (Richard Savoie) is a Palazi Patte electronics engineer who is fed up with ski cable car seats and online forums. Every time he took the cable car must sit on his side, and also to unlock the back of the ski boot lock, the entire snowboard is propped up by the forefoot, so that the feet very sour tired. Savannah has been thinking about making a magnetic-connected system so that the rocking skateboard can be sucked behind the shoe. Some of his own rare earth magnets are not strong enough to do such a system. When he sought help on the Internet, he found that many of the online engineering forums had become a gathering place for students to find answers to their homework.

Savannah is not the only one. The connection system lacks complex tools, and many other projects lack ideas. "I often do champagne projects with a beer budget," he said. He said, so he set up a "engineer to find something" on LinkedIn, a professional social networking site. (elfs!) Team, "tailored for people who are looking for ideas, tips, or resources to complete a project or prototype." Now more than 2000 people have joined the project (yes, Savannah got a solution to his magnet problem).

Niche social networks do not want to surpass Facebook, the dominant social domain. On the contrary, the value of such a small forum is only linked to the professional interest and special interests of professionals. Let them have a place to feel the brainstorming of technology issues, share experiences in the field, stay in control of industry dynamics, build partnerships, seek career advice, and, of course, find work. In fact, there is another reason for the beginning of this network, which is to distinguish between the communication of professional technology and the communication between family and friends.

"We avoid using ' social networks ' to describe ourselves," said John Day, head of student activity and group management at the American Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) member website John Dein. We are more inclined to call it an ' intellectual network '. ”

In fact, there are already a number of websites that offer services to specific professions that cater to the needs of different professional audiences. The Power Panel community website just on line is designed to cater to engineers who design, build, and maintain oil and gas and petrochemical products, as well as some other industrial facilities, and has received more than 150 members in the first three weeks of its operation. ELEMENT14 the target group of the project is the design engineer. In LinkedIn, you can also find a lot of groups that have been set up in the area of bias, such as discussing medical devices and graphical user interfaces. Such open-source sites as Arduino (a design and development platform) and CodePlex (Microsoft's free Open-source Project hosting site) also have engineers sharing their own projects. Again, such as ResearchGate and Labroots, the two sites can share research results while providing scientists and engineers with regular social networking services.

Labroots is closest to the regular social networking platform, and it can provide the most relevant content by digging deep into the user's information data. When CEO Grigg Krookshak (Greg Cruikshank) pushed the site online in 2008, he wanted to integrate social networking sites, professional websites and online bulletin boards. "Facebook is very good for social interaction," Krookshak said, "Linkedin is more like a professional broadcast board, the discussion plate doesn't have its own features, and it doesn't use data mining technology." "Labroots will provide real-time news, video postings, the use of research literature and comment functions, and even the" information wall "like Facebook. In Labroots, about 400,000 of registered users, nearly 76,000 people are engineers.

Savannah is clear, in his "engineer looking for something!" (elfs!) Such websites meet the needs of many engineers. "I've received a lot of thank-you notes, and most of them have built their own working relationships from this community group," he said. Although I have not yet found out which of the world's top 500 are born, but give it plenty of time and more than thousands of people, who knows what will happen in the future?

Compiled from: IEEE Technology Overview Niche Social networks:do Engineers Need Them?

Author Introduction: Pachi Patte (Prachi Patel) is the editor of IEEE Science and Technology survey. She holds a master's degree in electronic engineering from Princeton University, and writes for discovery, the Scientific American website and the Science and technology venture.

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