The comments at Bertalan’s Facebook post pointed me to Feedheads, a Facebook app to share Google Reader items.
Here’s the problem – I don’t share individual items in Google Reader. Most of my tags are public by default (here’s bioinformatics for example) and if I like a post, I star it (and the starred list is public too). These apps for sharing feeds would be much more useful if they aggregated my starred items and/or all posts under a tag, IMHO.
Like most bloggers, I keep an eye on my blog statistics (and try not to get too obsessive about it).
I frequently see a spike when Genome Technology Online link to one of my posts. The previous post, on Facebook apps for scientists, resulted in my biggest spike ever – 798 views in a day. Somewhat surprising at first, given that it was a short, uninformative post linking to a far better blog article (Bertalan, I hope that you received some traffic!)
What this tells me is not that my post was great, but that people are very interested in what Facebook (and perhaps social networks in general) can do for scientists. Next question: what should we (the “web 2.0 for science” community) be doing better to capitalise on that interest?
Via Nodalpoint: we now have a Nodalpoint Facebook group.
This inspired me to give Facebook another try – there was an awful lot of bright flashing colours and a bit of a MySpace feel to it last time I registered, which was enough to make me deregister immediately. Things seem to have improved. Not sure that I’ll be hanging out there very much, but here I am.
Facebook doesn’t seem to distinguish much between “friends” as in people you’ve had a beer with at least once and “friends” as in people you know from online activity. If I recognised you from somewhere, I sent a friend request but I won’t be offended if you decline!
update: jeez, what a timesink this thing is! Facebook Firefox toolbar is not too bad.
What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate 