*bump* I think this is neat. I added a couple but I'm sure there are some I'm forgetting. - Bill Hooker

Thanks! Any ideas of where I could find a list available of these tools used by scientists? I'm writing my MSc and looking for references... Thanks for your help! Anne. - Anne PAJON from email

Hi Anne - there is a partial list at http://wiki.cameronneylon.net/index... but there are some much more comprehensive lists around. The slides at http://www.slideshare.net/Cameron... has one slide with a long list of services. If you can't get it from slideshare drop me a line I can put the file up here or somewhere. My lists are more social services that aren't really used by scientists though... :-) - Cameron Neylon

Thanks. I've based my list on your list on your wiki. I saw the slides too but it would be great if you could copy here the list. -- I've been working on this topics for my MSc for a while thinking first at providing a prototype social netwoking site for sharing data, but there are so many options around already, that I am currently thinking at providing only what would be good to have instead of a potential solution. Hope that makes sense. - Anne PAJON

I think it makes a lot of sense. My personal view is that there is probably more of value in the way of social science to be done here rather than coding. And I include critical analyses of existing services and requirements assessments in that. I also think that we should think more about federated sharing rather than centralised services but that tends to be a hard sell. - Cameron Neylon

Really need to return to that wiki project and get it moving as well. I think there's a reasonable framework for assessment there now, just a question of setting a schedule and actually getting it moving...and finding the time :-) - Cameron Neylon

I would be more than happy to help if I could. It would be very good to get this comprehensive list of what is available and with assessment data. - Anne PAJON

Here's that list from the slide - some duplication and very out of date. It doesn't include any of the stack overflow instances, or a bunch of more recent things: http://friendfeed.com/cameron... - Cameron Neylon

Thanks for the list! - Anne PAJON

What would be great would be to combine the lists together to get something comprehensive and then just start working down them. Maybe one week for each service? The wiki is accessible via an openID if you want to edit. It would be great to have your help! - Cameron Neylon

Combining the list is a great idea, I'll get to see if I have an OpenID and go there to help. - Anne PAJON

Is Google docs the best place so far for collaborative work? Are we all waiting for the big Wave? - Anne PAJON

Wave has some advantages but GoogleDocs is perfectly fine for this kind of aggregation work and has none of the technical challenges of Wave. Wave is better if many people are working at the same time but as long as it is reasonably asynchronous other tools are probably simpler. - Cameron Neylon

Wikis are also a good place for collaborative work, especially as they can be made a public resource - Deepak Singh

But you need more infrastructure in place than Google docs. Synchronous changes are almost impossible on wikis. - Anne PAJON

agreed but depends on what you are developing. A wiki makes a great living resource which is designed to be multi-user and track changes, etc. For what you're trying to do it's as good a mechanism as any. - Deepak Singh from IM

I see this is growing pretty quick. Probably it would be good to organize the social networks by separating them by functionality, amount of people, importance of people (if possible), importance of the different areas, etc. Very interesting! I was trying to do something similar with NLP resouces, but not just SN. - mariana

There's a balance here - also the terminology is fuzzy. In many ways a public google doc, or collection of them _is_ a wiki. It's easy to get into a futz when one person is talking about the interface, one person talking about the back end, and one person talking about the principle of how things work. Wikimedia installations are good for providing common working spaces and instant publication with reasonably nice presentation but they're no good for highly synchronous work. GoogleDocs is better for this but isn't as nicely integrated into a multidocument system by default and still fails with high load and lots of people trying to edit. Also GD isn't so good for presentation/publication but that's a very minor issue. Wave is great for high synchronicity but isn't accessible to many and has some issues with the interface. What we ultimately need is the Wiki like content management with a Wave like editing interface capability (and the client made practical to use...) - Cameron Neylon

For many purposes I prefer etherpad to Wave or Docs. (Etherpad is now open source, and I doubt etherpad.com will last.) No one tool is best for all purposes, of course - for some things a version control system like svn or git is better. - Michael Nielsen

yes, etherpad has the better interface and copes with the concurrency well. - Cameron Neylon

Don't forget Zotero, and someone told me about wizfolio, which appears to be a web-based competitor to Mendeley. BTW latter is more than reference management I think; if you called it reference & document management it might be closer. - Chris Rusbridge

Chris, when you say someone "told you about Wizfolio" do you mean this guy? http://twitter.com/aceblaster Y'all know I'm biased, but that looks spammish no matter how you slice it. - Mr. Gunn

Yes Mr Gunn, you're right it was him. I was just trying to fill out the list. - Chris Rusbridge

A number of Etherpad clones have since been set up, and things are developing fast in that area, so if we'd need Etherpad functionality, it would be easy to get. - Daniel Mietchen

At some level I think a wiki is fine for this kind of job - shift to google docs/etherpad if too many people want to edit simultaneously. Will try to issue new call to arms tomorrow but my suggestion would be to wade into Research Gate en masse starting on Feb 3rd and go from there. - Cameron Neylon

Do you mean going to Research Gate for testing it? - Anne PAJON

Absolutely - but not just dropping in individually but going in as a group and seeing how the service works - Cameron Neylon

What kind of functionality do you expect to find at ResearchGate? I would have expected something like Cliqset would have been more your speed. - Mr. Gunn