Connotea, Nature's social bookmarking site, is to be shut down, according to a post by Grace Baynes, the head of corporate communications at Nature Publishing Group, at the Schemes and Memes blog.
The service began in 2004 when, Baynes says, "there were no social media tools for scientists." Now, though, Facebook and Twitter as well as the more science-specific CiteUlike and ReadCube have proliferated.
"Regular users will know that Connotea, like many social media services, has suffered growing problems with spam, and associated service outages," she writes. "This isn't the level of service and reliability that we wish to provide for our users, and we have concluded that the research community is better served by dedicated social bookmarking services."
The service will cease on March 12, 2013, and Baynes urges users to export their bookmarks prior to that date.