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Comment by bbgm | Hacker News Reader

We had a wonderful, thriving life science community [1] on Friendfeed, which we have not been able to replicate since. Some of that crowd even published a paper about it [2]. Most of the original crowd left sometime after the FB acquisition. While many of us hang out on Twitter, it's not the same thing).

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1. http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists

2. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...

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I miss that interface and community. Even if FriendFeed was still around, though, I wonder if it would be as popular. That group contained the early adopters of internet communication among scientists, a movement that has now grown exponentially. My guess is that the signal would be overwhelmed by noise, or broken down into sub-groups by specialty, which would overwhelm the delightful serendipity of it all.

Great question. No idea. The other thing to note is that a lot of the people who were involved then have moved on to other things and probably could not stay as involved (pointing at myself). It remains the best time I've had online.

I'm with you there. I had a lot more free time in grad school than I do now (both personally and professionally). Judging from the updates I see on twitter and blogs, most of that core group has gone on to bigger, better, more time-consuming things.

I wonder if the kids these days are using snapchat to complain about how we're all dinosaurs. :)

FriendFeed has good tools for keeping signal:noise high: Hide, like, best of day

That's where the 'nobody is on [insert social network name other than fb/twitter]' argument fails. There are always some communities that form around these websites for a variety of reasons . For example google plus has got some early success with photograpers, probably because its photo viewing experience was way ahead of the competition at the time.

It is always a pity to see such a space disappear.

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