I could be biosed, since I'm involved in nanopore field, but I would not make an opinion based on one publication. 

It is amazing if this tech works even as "proof of principle" - the rest will follow.

I certainly want it to succeed as well, just was looking for some "field testing" beyond this one publication. Anyone out there with direct experience with these sequencers?

I think Nick Loman in Birmingham was first to put an 'in the wild' nanopore-derived sequence online, so it may be worth contacting his group.

See the videocast of talks by Nick Loman and others have been using nanopore http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/blog/author/nick/ its under Balti & Bioinformatics

At least bacterial sequencing is now going on record as workable. See preprint by Nick Loman and others http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/09/26/009613.2

Signing up for the ONT MAP would give you a lot of inside that the many labs still on the early-access program are not allowed to share just yet. If you do want it to succeed, I think you will find a good and helpful crowd there to help you along.

We are using the MinION, but not for metagenomics. I do have a colleague in Stockholm who is trying it for just that, but I'm afraid they are as bound by their non-disclosure clause as we are, until we are done evaluating.

I would like to add the following regarding this one paper posted in the original post: http://www.homolog.us/blogs/blog/2014/09/05/open-science-fail-oxford-nanopore-kicks-out-alex-mikheyev-from-its-map-program/

Also, in the meantime, there is the data and the preprint from Nick Loman's group available. This is all done on single genomes. I think it is fair to say and nothing that should be a secret that the performance of the MinION is still very early stage. That is perfectly fine by me and I absolutely welcome the ONT MAP approach. So one must be aware of the current limitations of the technology. And probably the most striking/obvious of these current limitations are the throughput and accuracy. And if you have a look at what problems are evident for single genomes, I think that metagenomes are not making the story easier.

Principally, I do not see why running metagenome sequencing should _not_ be possible using the MinION (or its future siblings, e.g., the PromethION). However, the analysis of that data will be challenging once reasonable throughput is achieved. Not only for the general challenges associated with metagenomes, i.e., missing reference genomes, but also because of the error rate that must either be corrected or "somehow " taken into account. It is great to have long reads, e.g., for taxonomic resolution, but if you have only comparably short stretches that map perfectly, there is still a lot of potential for improvement.

Great, thanks everyone for the suggestions ! Sounds like there is not a lot out there yet, and from the review of Lomas's work it does not look promising.