Nascent

I was hoping to coin 'the streamosphere' but it's already in Google. Neh. Anyway...

The last month or two has seen many science 2.0 (for lack of a better term) bloggers pick up Twitter and FriendFeed.

If you've never heard of the former then you probably shouldn't be reading Nascent. The latter is an activity aggregator: you sign up, tell it which other services you use (del.icio.us? last.fm? blogs?) and it generates a page listing all of your public activity across those services like the Facebook mini-feed writ large. You can see feeds from your friends and attach short comments to their activity.

Services like these are less effort than blogging and you get more instant feedback in the form of little smiley faces from other users. The downside is that with everybody communicating in SMS-length 128 character bursts it can feel a little bit like one of those 'txt cafe' premium hotlines you see advertised on satellite TV late at night, albeit with fewer muscley bikers and bikini'ed hot-tubbers (Nature staff excepted).

If that description hasn't put you off too much it's worth dipping a toe into the activity stream. For the social networking aspect to work you really need a social network, so I've listed a couple of science bloggers below with links to their FriendFeed accounts. Not quite a blogroll... a twitlist? Maybe not. ;) You can follow people without having them follow you, so don't be shy (but don't expect a follow in return straight away):

• Andrew Perry - of Your Bones Got a Little Machine
• Andrew Walkingshaw - of Brighten the Corners
• Attila Csordas - of Pimm
• Cameron Neylon - of Science in the Open
• Deepak Singh - of BBGM
• JC Bradley - of Useful Chemistry
• Jason Stajich - of Stajichlog
• Matt Wood - of Green is Good
• Michael Barton - of Bioinformatics Zen
• Neil Saunders - of WYDIRD
• Pawel Szczesny - of Freelancing Science
• Pedro Beltrao - of Public Rambling
• Ricardo Vidal - of My Biotech Life

See you there!