Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6 517 One of the biggest potential benefits of health social networks could be in making long-tail medicine possible, allowing small communities to find each other via the Internet. The long-tail concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail) is that with traditional models, it was only economically feasible for service providers to address the largest 20% of the market. Internet models allow the other 80% of the supply and demand curves to come together too. For example, Amazon and Netflix, providing books and movies by mail, are able to stock 100% of possible items in their inventories whereas the cost constraints of brick-and-mortar booksellers and movie rental companies only allow them to stock the top-selling 20% of items. The cost structure of large pharmaceutical companies is just like that of brick-and-mortar stores and record companies; they need blockbuster products with significant sales. Peer-to-peer health social network models could open this up substantially and address orphan diseases and what may be the other 80% of the market. Individual researchers, small to mid-size pharmaceutical companies and foundations could start to quantify demand for non-marquee health conditions and work on solutions collaboratively with health social network patient communities, possibly also funded by the patient communities. There are several ways that health social networks could exercise their power as market agents. One idea is for health social network members to come together in aggregated buying groups for discounts and Request for Proposal (RFP) solicitations from vendors for health insurance, medical services, gym memberships, vitamin supplements and other health-related purchases. Health social networks could serve as the platform for virtual services such as on-demand physician consultation. Another idea is for health social networks, in addition to their participation in regular clinical trials, to become involved with the ongoing testing of non-drug remedies such as supplements, vitamins, minerals, nutraceuticals, herbal remedies and other products; testing both contents claims and efficacy. This could work both ways; supplement companies could contract with health social networks for studies to discover and demonstrate the benefits of their products and health social networks could periodically review all large supplement providers, like Consumer Reports (http://www.consumerreports.org) with more rigorous health-benefit testing. Health social networks could provide a variety of independent product certifications such as “Remedy X is MedHelp tested and approved,” or “3 out of 4 MedHelp patients say they use Remedy Y and have experienced these results...” Health social networks could also be a useful platform for multi-factor longitudinal studies where it may take years to assess the impact of lifestyles, interventions and behaviors such as taking certain groups of vitamins. Studies would not need to be designed at the outset but could be derived from on-demand database queries to probe for connected factors and groups of patients with similar profiles. Translational medicine, converting basic research findings to patient therapies, continues to be one of the greatest outstanding problems in medicine and health social networks might be able to be helpful here too. One way is by connecting researchers with health social networks such that there is more of a direct and continuous feedback loop between the needed research and the executed research. A key step may be missing from the current translational medicine process that expert patients and health social network researchers could help with, the enumeration of the specific functionalities or capabilities of the research findings in a context such that non-scientists who are knowledgeable in the area can more easily see what solutions those capabilities could generate, the “productizing” of the research findings. There could be an opportunity to connect researchers, medical professionals, patients, health social network representatives, industry analysts and other parties in Translational