Academia.edu

I like academia.edu. The academic family tree idea is pretty cool (I know that the concept has been around for a while in various guises but their implementation is pretty slick) and I like the fact that new visitors can arrive and be interacting with the site within minutes. It's also nice to see an academic networking site that, well, doesn't look like Facebook.

I'm also impressed by the speed at which they've been throwing up refinements and bug fixes... and by the adverts on PhD. Canny marketing (good work poorly paid but well fed intern)! The academia.edu team are a smart bunch of people which is probably how they got funding in the first place.

For balance what's not good about it? The flash freezes my mac on an empty cache... and the .edu TLD is really only for educational institutions, not commercial enterprise (vetting only started in 2001, academia.edu was first registered back in '99). Tsk! Ironically my other bugbear is that I can't join properly because I work for a commercial enterprise and not an accredited educational institution.