Academia.edu launches, a Geni For Researchers

river_styx · on Sept 18, 2008

How did these guys get a .edu domain? I thought only accredited colleges were allowed register those.

kul · on Sept 18, 2008

back in the day it was easier to register .edu domains, and they bought it from someone who'd owned it for a long time.

aston · on Sept 18, 2008

They've had it for quite a while.

arjunb · on Sept 18, 2008

yeah, i think they were grandfathered in. very cool ideas, i hope they do well. their UI seems a bit overcomplicated, though.

www.scilink.com is the only other player i know of sorta in this space (and labmeeting, as mentioned). anything better out there?

Alex3917 · on Sept 18, 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_databases_and_search_e...

Of the search engines listed, I think Scopus and Web of Science both compete in the area of linking papers together by citations, but I don't really use either.

bbb · on Sept 18, 2008

Yuck. A great reminder why you shouldn't use Flash to build a key navigation element of your site. This particular site is slow, and it behaves in very unexpected ways. Is there any advantage to using Flash in this situation?

BenS · on Sept 18, 2008

I think that a simple nested list view would be more useful to browse departments. The tree is nice too, but not very practical at the current speed.

auntjemima · on Sept 18, 2008

site's unusably slow (right now)

quasimojo · on Sept 18, 2008

profs are just like you, they want to scope out hot chicks...which is why they will continue to use fb