A new social network from google with a more fine-grained relationships model than twitter or facebook called circles.God sharing features and also useful connectivity features for collaboration such as hangouts. +1 button on web sites makes it easy to share when web browsing and control who you share with.
Alan J CAnn is a member of my personal network. An influential educatuional and science blogger here gives some good reasons for blogging which sets out as a good a reason for using blogs in research as any other I've seen.