Their kids may have got there first but scientists will soon have their very own version of MySpace, where they will be able to share preliminary results, ideas and research tools.

Dubbed MyExperiment, the site will give the scientific community web tools such as social networking and the ability to rate software or tag it with keywords. "There are these great collaboration tools that 12-year-olds are using. It's all back-to-front," says Robert Stevens, a bioinformatician at the University of Manchester, UK, and a member of the team developing the site.

As well as sharing ideas, the team hopes the site will become a marketplace for swapping and modifying the software tools that bioinformaticians use to identify and characterise genes.