SciLink Blog

Make sure you’ve got a backup plan and plenty of generators so your site will remain functioning. This is what we all learned at SciLink last December. Since then, NSTAR has delayed its part of the bargain and postponed our building’s transformer upgrade for almost 5 months now. Why do you care? Well, we can’t power back on our servers until they’ve installed, turned on and validated our new 4k amp (yes that’s a k as in 1000) transformer that powers 5 city blocks.

SciLink will be down from 11/30 - 12/3 at 7am. We will resume normal operations at 8am EST on 12/3. Thanks very much!

Brian

Cambridge, MA — November 7, 2007 — SciLink Inc., a privately held developer of professional networking tools for the scientific community, today announced the release of the first product designed to allow organizations of any size to host their own private professional network to stay in touch with personnel, customers and alumni. The company also announced that Biogen Idec, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIIB) has become SciLink’s first customer for this new service.

“Almost 29 million Americans now work remotely at least one day per month, and experts estimate that approximately 100 million U.S. workers will telecommute by 2010,” said SciLink’s founder and CEO, Brian Gilman. “As this trend continues, it becomes increasingly more difficult for corporations to manage their relationships with employees, contractors and collaborators. SciLink is designed to fill this gap by providing the tools and platform necessary for companies of any size to start managing the most important asset of a business, their people. We are proud to work with Biogen Idec as our initial customer for this science-oriented networking tool.”

“We are extremely pleased to be working with SciLink to provide Biogen Idec with these professional networking tools,” said Connie Matsui, Biogen Idec’s Executive Vice President of Knowledge and Innovation Networks. “As a global company with sites and people around the world, it becomes difficult to maintain an inventory of expertise.  SciLink will effectively enable us to improve our awareness of internal expertise and increase our ability to network and collaborate, both within Biogen Idec and with the broader scientific community.”

SciLink provides a professional networking platform specifically tailored for the scientific and medical community. Employing the SciLink platform, customers can build and visualize relationships among colleagues, collaborators, business partners, alumni and friends. By leveraging these relationships, SciLink users can find great talent, retain knowledge assets and increase productivity. SciLink’s professional networking platform is unique in a number of aspects including its ability to help users to visualize their relationships and career paths over time by using Scilink’s Tree of Science application and its scientifically oriented content push engine, named The Phoenix Suggestion Engine.

“Phoenix learns what you find interesting as you use it, and suggests content that you find important and interesting in real time,” Gilman said.

I’ve been waiting to write anything about OpenSocial until there were published API’s (Application Programming Interface) and now, thanks to this link, we now have our answer to what OpenSocial will mean for the community of social media developers and network providers. First, I am very pleased that Google has put forth an effort to standardize the “fabric of the web” so that developers will have one common and consistent API to work with. As usual, google has made a very smart business decision to sign up FaceBook’s competitors to support their SPI (Service Provider Interface). This may force FaceBook to support their own home brewed API as well as OpenSocial or throw theirs out if OpenSocial becomes the de facto standard (which Google is hoping for).

So what does this really do for you the user of social networking applications/websites. Well, if you hate to add your personal information into every website you use over and over again, I’m sorry to say you’re still going to have to do it. To be fair, Google states,”Important: The OpenSocial People data API hasn’t been released yet; this document is a preview of the developer’s guide that we’ll publish when we release the data API. All of the details are subject to change, but this preview should give you a general idea of what the API will be like”.

Honestly, not much information can be transferred across sites using these API’s. Here are the 8 pieces of information that you will never have to enter into another social networking website again:

Notice the last row in this table “gd:extendedProperty” - This is where google will extend the API in the future. For those of you who are not programmers, this is a common convention to use to extend an API in a “reasonable” way. We can only wait and see if this becomes a “dirty closet” to stuff other data or is truly used as an extension point in the future.

What does this mean for SciLink? That’s a great question and one that we’ve been contemplating for a few days. First, we are extremely excited about this move by google as our platform was designed from the ground up support developers through an external API. In fact, the entire SciLink website is written using these API’s so that any web developer can plug into and use SciLink functions. We have hesitated to release these developer modules because they are non-standard, undocumented and proprietary to our platform. With the introduction of OpenSocial, we now have a clear path to support a developer community who would like to extend SciLink with new functionality. To that end, we will be actively and aggressively supporting the OpenSocial SPI when it is fully documented and released. This will open up our platform to developers using a well thought out, well documented and most importantly, standard API to develop your applications.

If you’re not convinced, think of it this way: There are a limited number of wireless providers out there that you can choose from: Verizon, Sprint, ATT etc. In Google-Speak these are social networking “containers”. You have a large number of cell phone manufacturers to choose from when you sign up for a network like Motorola’s Razr etc. These are like the application you will be writing using OpenSocial each one will have interesting features etc. that you will use to differentiate yourself from the other application providers. OpenSocial is the protocol that the providers “speak” so that you, the customer, can switch to another provider without having to throw out your phone if/when you decide to switch providers so you, the customer, should be pretty happy when you switch to another social network and (supposedly) applications that you love can come along with you. As always, the devil is in the details.

That wraps up our thoughts on OpenSocial for now. More to come.