Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million • Hacker News Board

Re: Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million

#11

Post by sketerpot » Thu, Apr 29, 2010, 3:24 AM UTC

I just signed up, and the web site is remarkably slick. Anybody who's made web apps knows how hard it is to make something that just does what it's supposed to as well as this. I especially like the easy integration with GMail, Facebook, and so on.

The signup process is a bit long, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing.

Edit: When I selected "Electrical & Computer Engineering" from the drop-down menu of departments, the ampersand got turned into "&". I'm pretty sure this is a bug.

Re: Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million

#12

Post by iskander » Thu, Apr 29, 2010, 6:58 AM UTC

sketerpot wrote: post #11

I just signed up, and the web site is remarkably slick. Anybody who's made web apps knows how hard it is to make something that just does what it's supposed to as well as this. I especially like the easy integration with GMail, Facebook, and so on. The signup process is a bit long, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing. Edit: When I selected "Electrical & Computer Engineering" from the drop-down menu of departments,…

I disagree. I found the interface clunky and the research interest categories were really sloppy (typos, duplicates, inconsistent granularities, etc...). Also, the inability to click on section names during sign up was very frustrating.

Re: Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million

#13

Post by uggedal » Thu, Apr 29, 2010, 7:57 AM UTC

How did they manage to get the domain name? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu:

Starting on October 29, 2001, only post-secondary institutions and organizations that are accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies are eligible to apply for a edu domain.

Re: Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million

#14

Post by sonofjanoh » Thu, Apr 29, 2010, 8:59 AM UTC

sketerpot wrote: post #11

I just signed up, and the web site is remarkably slick. Anybody who's made web apps knows how hard it is to make something that just does what it's supposed to as well as this. I especially like the easy integration with GMail, Facebook, and so on. The signup process is a bit long, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing. Edit: When I selected "Electrical & Computer Engineering" from the drop-down menu of departments,…

There is an alternative venture http://www.ulurn.com. Not as successful though...

Re: Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million

#15

Post by jplewicke » Thu, Apr 29, 2010, 1:12 PM UTC

snewe wrote: post #9

This could be very helpful, so long as academics maintain their profiles. I currently use an ad-hoc system of Google Reader's "check if webpage changed" functionality to check for new papers in my fields of interest. For economics, these are listed on pages like: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=M13 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=G24 which gives an ugly summary of updates to…

I'm not sure about field-wide RSS feeds, but SSRN does have author-specific RSS feeds like http://www.ssrn.com/rss/authors/1997/0701/998.rss for Eugene Fama.