SciLnk
Some friends of mine have been working on an interesting new startup called SciLnk. Essentially, the site is LinkedIn for life scientists. It will also allow you to browse pubmed abstracts via the network of authors. Often when you’re researching a subject you want to read all the papers published by a particular person and his or her collaborators on the topic, and it’s not as easy as it should be to collect everything via PubMed. SciLnk hopes to leverage the people network to improve the literature browsing experience and vice versa. There are lots of other interesting directions to take such a resource: improving the conference-going experience, grant searching/suggestions, job searching, etc.
They recently posted screenshots (and, more recently, these) of the product under development, and you can sign up to get in on internal beta testing at scilnk.com.
Full disclosure: I was personally working with the SciLnk team in its early days, but quickly realized I had bitten off more than I could chew, what with having a full-time day job and not living in Boston with the rest of the crew. I no longer have any financial interest in the company, I just think it’s a cool idea.