Twitter received a major update in December and is gradually rolling out a brand-new look with a host of new features. The update is arguably the most comprehensive and wide-ranging change since the microblogging service was launched in 2006.

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In a previous post, we introduced Mendeley, the reference manager and academic social network that’s taking the research world by storm, even scooping an award in the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards. At the time of writing, Mendeley reports that 1,113,597 people have signed up and over 106 million scientific papers have been uploaded. Medicine is a particularly popular discipline, with over 8 million papers and almost 3,000 groups.

Over the past few weeks we have been working with Mendeley to help you better organise your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest medical research. We are in the process of sending Mendeley a complete metadata set, so that full and accurate bibliographic data of all BMJ articles are stored in the Mendeley database. In addition, we have incorporated a ‘web importer’ button across our journals at article-level, so that it takes just one click to add any BMJ paper to your Mendeley library. more…

Google is taking yet another stab at social networking with Google+ after the past disappointments of Buzz and Wave. This time, however, they have launched a more polished product than usual and offer a solution to the problem of keeping one’s personal and work life separate. The interface and concepts are cleaner and simpler, which will make it easier for early adopters to engage, use and then share their experiences.

In its blog post to introduce Google+, Google’s Vic Gundotra said the following:

“Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”

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