This year's SfN conference in Chicago was the usual overwhelming scientific experience: over 30,000 participants, thousands and thousands of posters, symposia, talks and other presentations. Also as usual (and lamented by everyone), the conference center WiFi system was completely inadequate for the onslaught of tens of tousands of devices demanding access at this nerd-fest. It almost seemed like a mockery that SfN was promoting its Facebook fan-page everywhere.
However, the Facebook logo triggered a thought process which I thought may be worth sharing. Why does a scientific society have to go to Facebook for social web technology? Why doesn't it have that technology built-in? After all, social and society don't share the same etymological ancestry for nothing (i.e., the Latin word socius meaning "companion"). I'm sure over 40,000 members are a large enough base where most current tools would work fine. For instance, imagine you could have a buddy-list of other SfN members. Then, when the program of the next meeting is available, you can choose to pre-populate your itinerary automatically with all the presentations by your buddies. You don't have to ever feel bad again that you missed the poster of one of your friends/colleagues (and there's still plenty of excuses if you actually didn't want to go there Likewise, imagine you could choose to make certain portions of your itinerary visible to your buddies. Then everybody in a circle of buddies could see which are the most visited presentations among peers. You could take that idea further by allowing twitter-like comments or ratings, etc. on the individual presentations.
Scientists are obviously using social web technology in their private lives or SfN wouldn't outsource to Facebook. So what is keeping scientific societies from capitalizing on the modern technology to facilitate interactions in their communities? What is keeping social web companies from licencing their technology to scientific societies?