Mendeley, the-Last.fm-of-research

Another Papers user here, and I also use a combination of CiteULike ( http://www.citeulike.org ) and Bibdesk ( http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net ). I find either system both easier and more powerful than Mendeley.

last.fm uses a plugin for your music player to record to which songs you listen, and for how long. You can then elect to expose this to your friends on last.fm or use this with last.fm's collaborative filtering to suggest new songs.

The idea of doing this for research papers isn't bad, but I wonder how many people will pick it up. Depending on the subfield, I already see people act secretively about the current direction on which they are working, even with close colleagues. Sometimes it's about fear of being scooped, other times it's about trying a different direction. That would work against doing a stream of papers read, even if you could elect to share it only with some people.

Maybe more of an issue is the network effect. To really show value, I think they will need to capture enough people in specific sub sub areas that new ideas result, leading to publishable papers. Getting those people on to the service is a chicken and egg problem.