Mendeley

In comments to my recent post Jan Reichelt brought my attention to another academic collaboration tool, called Mendeley. The idea is a bit different from those of 2collab, and therefore one cannot directly compare these two things. While 2collab is a bookmarking tool, dealing with articles somewhere in the web, the heart of Mendeley is an online library, where you can upload and organize your .pdf files. You can also create your profile with CV and publication list, as well as join different groups. The online library can be synchronized with files on your computer using the offline tool, Mendeley desktop.

Surprisingly enough, Mendeley correctly reads almost all the metadata from .pdf's. However, it doesn't work correctly with arXiv preprints: what I had is the arXiv link read as an article title (e.g. arXiv:0809.3331), and the blank field of publication name (where the journal title should be). Hope that the authors can fix it soon.

Another point is that at the moment there are only very few users of such services as Mendeley and 2collab are. However, I believe that in the nearest future using "academic social networks" will be as usual as, for instance, having a personal webpage at institute website nowadays.