Health Social Networks

OrganizedWisdom is indeed an organization bursting with wisdom.

Health Social Networks started appearing in 2006 when 3-4 sites pioneered the vertical with a lot of PR. OrganizedWisdom was one of them. Despite the fact that they launched with the wisdom cards already at the front it was really hard to understand what OW was all about, especially because it was mostly a social network and how does a wisdom card relate to social??

Only a year later that I fully understood OrganizedWisdom, it happened when they rebranded the site to social search – now wisdom cards make sense.

Did they plan on doing it this way? I don’t really think so. I believe it was a real time change adapting to the market that became a bit too busy. I love companies that know how to do that.

Today OrganizedWisdom is both the leading search engine in the health vertical and also a great company run by veteran entrepreneurs (I hope to have an email interview with them soon) relaying on the very popular work-from-home concept. People write wisdom card from home (social), Drs verify the cards from home. They maintain a forum to support the work on the wisdom cards (as apposed to the other sites on our list that do it for the patients) and manage to grow so nicely without the overheads of a large office and crew. Managing this sort of operation and doing it so nicely is something to be proud of.

And the real life tests:

I started off by searching for bipolar disorder as this is something I know about.

Auto-complete saved me from typing the whole thing (it was the first option after typing bipo) – I know its nothing special but I love that ;-).

I got the Bipolar Wisdom Card which is managed by Chris Miller. Don’t know who Chris is but she knows a lot about a lot of things (more than 100 wisdom cards on different topics and areas).

The page starts off with a short description about the disorder followed by a few facts. I even learned that some people may be categorized as having bipolar NOS - Not Otherwise Specified, I wouldn’t leave the doctors office if he told me that). I did some checking to find out it was taken from wikipedia, too bad there was no mentioning or credit for it on the page.

The page continues with news, more resources, symptoms, causes, treatments and more.

All in all the card is full of knowledge and resources and would be a great place to start if I were writing a school paper, it lacks some personal touch that a bipolar patient would definitely be looking for.

Second test, Complete Blood Count. Lets say I just got the test results and wanted to know what my status is:

This time the card was BINGO!

Short description was accurate.

The card contained all the links a person needs to find out everything about his blood count.

It would have been nice to have the different measures on page but having all the resources listed is good enough.

Final words

The Good:

1. Great company with a great website
2. Unique and powerful solution.
3. Your source for health related resources.

The Bad:

1. Missing some personal touch.
2. paying for content is not really social networking
3. wikipedia

and to the question in the title: NO

I don’t think OW will change the world, but its here to stay and I love them for it!