Social networking for scientists

One of the features of CHARUN, my current project at work, is that users will have the option of saving classifiers they've built (if they're willing to accept a cookie or, if they want more than ten classifiers, are willing to create a username and password -- we don't want to collect tons of data, we just want to minimise the chance of people abusing the system). It occurred to me that it would be a Useful Thing if people who had accounts could pinpoint other users to share their classifiers with -- ie, so that people could work in groups, the way we've got going here.

Which made me think, "Okay, so why not let people have the option to identify themselves, open up their classifiers for everyone to use if they want to, contact others for collaboration and let themselves be contacted? It's hard to find collaborators. Wouldn't this be a useful way for people to quickly discover other people who are working on similar interests -- 'find everyone who's built a classifier similar to mine'?"

I mentioned this to Andy, and he grooved on it. Apparently I'm now building Orkut for biologists.