Gather For Expert Networking

It looks like social networking tends to evolve into social-expert networking: a community is not enough for a user – we often want to find experts in the community to rely on their opinions. LinkedIn launches Answers, BitWine partners with Skype – it is all about expertise and shows that expert opinion is what matters and generates income today.

Gather.com – a social media website for adults – is announcing its new move in the very same direction: partnerships for expert participation on Gather.com content channels – named Essentials here. Essentials are the 9 fields Gather users are encouraged to communicate within. And from now on the essentials at Gather will be enhanced with new Gather partners joining these channels as experts: Harvard Health Publications (a division of Harvard Medical School) for the Health channel, Publishers Weekly for the Books channel, Columbia Records for the Music channel, and McGraw-Hill Professional for the Money channel.

This move gives Gather members a new engagement with experts and exclusive content they generate in threads and live chats featured within Gather Essentials.

It seems almost impossible for such a model to be accepted at MySpace because youngsters and teenagers networking here tend not to recognize any third-party authority – instead they prefer to grow experts among themselves. At the same time adults use the real-life communication model even when they communicate online. And in the real life you would prefer an advice of an experienced doctor when your health is concerned.