The Graduate Junction

Graduate Junction is a new social networking site designed for graduate students and postdocs. I looked around a bit and found it clean, easy-to-use and potentially useful. This is how they explain it - give it a try and let me know what you think:

The Graduate Junction is a brand new website designed to help early career
researchers make contact with others with similar research interests,
regardless of which department, institution or country they work in. Designed
by two graduate researchers at the University of Durham, The Graduate Junction
has proved very popular with research students and academics alike. Within the
first two weeks after our launch in early May 2008 over 2000 researchers in the
UK had registered and the news had spread across 40 countries.

Currently research students have two main sources of information, published
literature and academic conferences. Whilst published literature is
essential, it can only ever reveal completed work. Relevant academic
conferences provide a forum for students with similar research interest to
interact but occur infrequently. It is very easy to become isolated, overly
focused on the specifics of one's own work and lose a sense of what other
related work is being done.

The Graduate Junction hopes to prevent that isolation and allow early career
researchers to start forming the networks which can stay with them throughout
their careers. The Graduate Junction aims to provide an atmosphere similar to
that at academic events and through the use of the internet aims to establish
an on-line worldwide graduate research community.

The Graduate Junction is unique because it links researchers based on 'research
keywords', promoting interdisciplinary relationships. By simply registering a
few basic details, users can search for fellow researchers by keyword,
institution, department, supervisor or name. Alternatively, users can search
The Graduate Junction's on-line research groups which allows them to find and
communicate with a number of other researchers sharing their research
interest. The Graduate Junction has been designed to be simple and provide
only information and functionality that is relevant to researchers.

The Graduate Junction is useful for all Master, Doctoral and Postdoctoral
researchers at any stage of the research process, and allows them to start
building networks and stay informed about current developments in their field.
With the addition of conference and postgraduate job listings imminent, The
Graduate Junction aims to be one of the most useful resources available for all
graduate researchers.