Kristen Nicole (on Mashable) calls our attention to the relaunch of carmun, an academic, social networking, bibliographic, research space geared primarily at students, but also open to graduate students and faculty. Nicole describes it as "kind of like what Facebook meant to be until kids at frat parties learned the ease with which photos can be posted and shared." Carmun offers social bookmarking, study groups, social networking according to subject of interest, bibliographic reference management, and a research engine that will try look up any resources you identify at your own library. The list of university libraries at which it works is fairly long, and the way that carmun provides and promotes this functionality is a nice antidote to Facebook's apparent reluctance to let librarians build search applications for the Facebook platform.

Earlier this month yet another major provider of web-based productivity tools, ThinkFree, announced the launch of a Facebook version. Given that Facebook variants are typically less supple than their open-web counterparts, it has not always been plain to me what the fuss was about. An excerpt cited in a Zoho blog is illuminating:

Imagine, students can find their classmates on Facebook using the courses feature ... and then work collaboratively with them using Zoho.

Right. Whatever else Facebook might be, it is also still a directory.

In two previous postings (here and here) I mentioned SlideShare and Facebook respectively. Now I notice in Brian Kelly's blog, UK Web Focus, that SlideShare has recently launched a version to run as a Facebook application. The pairing is a natural, and like the (Facebook) Librarian application referred to in my last posting, the SlideShare app offers educators yet another way to go where the students are.

The blog Friends:Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services recently described a new Facebook application called (Facebook) Librarian. One feature of the application is that users can go straight from Facebook to an array of research tools including Open WorldCat, Google Book Search, Wikipedia, etc.