Which web 2.0 services do scientists use?
Which web services are scientists actively contributing to?
There are ~ 1,240 Friendfeeders in science related rooms (the-life-scientists, scienceapps, science-2-0, science-online...). What percentage have listed usernames associated with the science related tools supported by Friendfeed?
| Service | Count |
|---|---|
| citeulike | 41 |
| connotea | 31 |
| delicious | 431 |
| digg | 208 |
| googlereader | 394 |
| 68 | |
| slideshare | 143 |
| 675 | |
| youtube | 341 |
Why this dataset isn't very good...
There's a bias towards services formally supported by Friendfeed - it's easy to add feeds from supported services. Connotea and CiteULike aren't formally supported though you can add your library RSS feeds manually. Many Friendfeed users won't bother to do this.
People may be contributing to services (like YouTube...) for reasons that have nothing to do with science.
People who use Friendfeed aren't a representative sample of scientists (though they may well be a representative sample of blog friendly, web savvy scientists).
People sometimes remove their Twitter feeds from Friendfeed to help keep the conversations that they start there in one place.
I picked the set of services to look at which is why you don't see, say, Wikipedia or OpenWetWare above (some preliminary analysis suggested that the numbers would be negligible).
That said...
We can still use it to guess at broad trends.
Almost a third of Friendfeed scientists have delicious bookmarks. Don't discount non-academic bookmarking services as a source of paper metadata.
A similar number use the share functionality in Google Reader.
Despite rumors to the contrary not everybody is on Twitter.
A surprising (to me) number of people are uploading and favouriting items on Slideshare.
Comments
Wouldn't it be lovely if Nature Network would pick up this information and automatically enrich my Nature Network profile...
Posted by: Egon Willighagen | May 29, 2009 07:14 AM
Egon+1
Another point,
the members of the life-scientists room are not all scientists (spammers,...)
Posted by: Pierre | May 29, 2009 09:43 AM
Thrilled to know that scientists are using SlideShare. We have been seeing it on the site as well, but glad to see other data supporting data. It makes a lot of sense: scientists create a lot of presentations and documents.
Did you also ask about any features people would like to see?
Rashmi
Cofounder & CEO, SlideShare
Posted by: Rashmi | May 29, 2009 06:43 PM
The citeulike numbers were also lower than I expected.
Posted by: Mr. Gunn | May 29, 2009 09:21 PM
I found this link through Twitter, where "Robostew" linked to me and has a message: "I'm following you because it's implicitly suggested here or on Friendfeed that you're a scientist."
While I welcome the compliment, I am an artist who paints scientific subjects. So if the above chart is based on the same collecting methods that collected me, you may have a lot less scientists in that pie chart than you think.
Posted by: Glendon Mellow | May 31, 2009 12:28 PM
"Despite rumors to the contrary not everybody is on Twitter." LOL! I'm not the only one who thinks that Twitter is both overrated and overly-hyped.
Posted by: April Lorier | June 5, 2009 03:13 AM
Re: Twitter etc. How much real science isn't getting done because everyone is *beep*ing around on digg, youtube, twitter, facebook, myspace.. ;)
Posted by: David Holden | June 5, 2009 07:40 AM