Distribution time is still very long in many fields - pretty much all fields except a few sub fields of math and physics that use the arxiv. Most fields see pub

Distribution time is still very long in many fields - pretty much all fields except a few sub fields of math and physics that use the arxiv. Most fields see publication cycles of 6-24 months. I think in the future it will be the norm for the distribution time for a paper within a given community to be measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. We are trying to make that happen with Academia.edu. I definitely agree with you that it's hard to decide what to read. Each month 60,000 papers are published in the biomedical field alone. We think that seeing what your friends are reading, as well as seeing which papers in your field are trending right now, could really help with this. The Google Scholar profile product is very different from what we are trying to do with Academia.edu. There is no sharing on the Google Scholar profile product, or News Feed where you can see papers from academics you follow. I see the Google Scholar profile product as a way of Google Scholar enhancing the accuracy of its search index, rather than as a way of building a research sharing platform, with first class research sharing features. Google is getting serious with social, as Google+ shows, but I don't think think the Google Scholar team sees itself as building a social product, a la Google+, for the research community. I could be wrong, but it just doesn't look like that right now.