This Onion talk put it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...
@afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia.
Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer-pressure?? I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it. What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks". When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.
I think there's a misunderstanding here on what ORCID is exactly. The name is an acronym for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID." It has nothing to do with publishing, but rather is being built as a central arbiter of academic identity.
Academics love to measure their importance by the papers they've authored or co-authored. Most databases currently track the names of authors associated with each published paper. But names are frustratingly ambiguous or degenerate, which makes it difficult to do things like create an auto-updated list of all the papers you've published.
ORCID is a publisher-funded non profit designed to reduce ambiguity in author identification, by simply assigning a UUID to every researcher. This is a case of publishers agreeing that collaboratively funding a single, centralized technical solution will benefit everyone much more than having a bunch of competing, siloed systems.
Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed-source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an optimal solution can only be opensource.