It would be nice to have a place to share ideas, links, com­ments in a very infor­mal way with oth­ers involved in research in sta­tis­ti­cal method­ol­ogy and data sci­ence. Cross​Val​i​dated​.com is great for spe­cific ques­tions, but is not suit­able for com­ment­ing on papers or shar­ing ideas and links.

Although I have a face­book account, this seems the wrong place to carry out a research dis­cus­sion because my fam­ily and friends are gen­er­ally not inter­ested, and it is messy to restrict posts to groups of friends. (In gen­eral, I ignore friend requests from any­one other than fam­ily and peo­ple I inter­act with out­side of work.) Also, the search facil­i­ties are non-​​existent, so if you want to find that post from a month ago, there is no alter­na­tive but to trawl through the his­tory look­ing for it.

LinkedIn is a more nat­ural fit, and there are groups set up just for this pur­pose. For exam­ple, there is an active fore­cast­ing group and another for R. There is also a very active data ana­lyt­ics group called Ana­lyt­icBridge.

Now we have Google+ which aims to be all things to all peo­ple. Using cir­cles of friends makes it easy to share posts with sub­sets of friends and so it could be a use­ful place for inter­act­ing with fam­ily, friends, work-​​colleagues, other researchers, and any other group, with­out flood­ing each of them with irrel­e­vant posts.  It is early days but it has the poten­tial to do every­thing face­book and LinkedIn already do and more. It still needs search (which is odd given it is a Google prod­uct), and groups, but I’m sure they aren’t far away. So if you’re game, sign up and check it out. If you want to add me as a friend, do it via my Google+ pro­file.

Related Posts:

• Some use­ful exten­sions for Gmail
• Stack exchange for sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis needs you!
• Cross­Val­i­dated Jour­nal Club
• More Stack­Ex­change sites
• Use Mende­ley to man­age your references