The recently released ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology gives some excellent insights into trends in college students' technology ownership, perceptions, skills, and habits.
"For adoption of new technologies in science, it has to be an order of magnitude more useful than current tools. We just don’t have the time to waste learning new tools that only marginally increase our productivity." Discussion: http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0/bceaea67/scientists-still-not-joining-social-networks
Reader's friend list comes from the list of people you can chat with on Google Talk or Gmail chat. To invite friends to see your Reader shared items, simply invite them to chat. To remove them, delete them from your Gmail contacts, or from your Talk list.
The Social Media Classroom is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more.