DiseaseSter is social software site where you track what diseases you got from what people. Got AIDS? Know who you got it from? Blog it! TB? Get connected with the community. Its not just about long term and fatal diseases on DiseaseSter. Their site is setup extremely good for tracking common cold type things. You can make note of people you suspect of infecting you, people you think you may have infected, etc. Its the start of the flu season, and I expect this will be the point where DiseaseSter goes mainstream. Due to the way people become connected on DiseaseSter, it more closely tied with your real life friends then any other social network site. The people you interact with every day are surely the ones you will infect and be infected by. This is really limited by real world connections, in a way no other social sites are, and that's pretty interesting.

This site is still very new. Like most of the other social network sites, they have not implemented FOAF yet, but they say it is on the way. I'm sure there are many researchers that will find ways to use this information to track epidemics. This site could be used for a sort of distributed open research.

In the intro flash (which is very funny, in an all too surreal sort of way) they list off a bunch of ways they see this site being used to curtail infection. At my last jobby-job, there were many people who traveled frequently, and we were always infecting each other with various flu type crap. They allude to this tool being useful for quickly alerting you of an infection risk in your immediate social network. I'm not sure how useful that would be. They seem focused on using this as a coordination tool for businesses (telling people to say home who have been exposed to something?), and some lofty goals for health care services integration. They say nothing about the site being used for people with compatible VD hooking up, but the site seems geared for that too. I could see why they would leave that out. People are going to have no problem figuring it out.

So this idea of tracking diseases as links using an artificial network model is pretty neat, abet really strange. There is a disturbing big brother aspect to this. It may be a perfect example of a way these sites, and IT in general, are mutating concepts of privacy. This site encourages people to snitch on people you suspect of being sick, but it also keeps track of how accurate you are. Something in the FAQ seemed to denote they remove links from people who's links are often disputed. I guess only time will tell how well it works..

What does everyone here think about this?

Update: Clearly, the secret is out.. The site isn't responding to requests anymore. This must be going around the blogs..

DiseaseSter - Where the network gets biological