from Hacker News

The Story Behind a Radical New Idea: A Social Network for Academia

by RichardPrice on 10/18/13, 10:22 PM with 34 comments

  • by memracom on 10/19/13, 3:05 AM

    Sorry to say that I almost fell off my chair to see a claim that a social network for academia is a radical new idea. This is an old established idea that has been with us for over 150 years. Academia is one of the most successful social networks ever. Sure, there are changes in how it functions but I wouldn't call that radical. Academics were the early adopters of the Internet, creating thousands of mailing lists before the web came along.

    I read lots of academic papers and I find them in two ways. One, is that I google for them. And the second is by following up references in papers to find a particular author's web page where they usually have lots of info about their work including a complete list of papers that they have published. Often these are very old school web pages that were started circa 1992 or so. The WWW only went public in 1990.

    Ever since academia moved onto the Internet in around 1990, they have been innovating with bibliographic servers that go far beyond a web search engine. It is nice to see some more incremental improvements but the hype about it being radical and new does more harm than help.

  • by schimmy_changa on 10/18/13, 11:20 PM

    I can't see how this is a "radical new idea". It's a good idea and very valuable if executed correctly, but taking an existing, proved model (aka facebook) and tweaking it to work for academics is not new and hardly radical. I'm not hating on the idea, I love more tools for academia, but the title is hyperbole.

  • by j_m_b on 10/18/13, 11:08 PM

    This is the first I have seen of academia.edu. Everyone I know are on researchgate.net. First comment was about orcid.org, another site I just found out about. Talk about market saturation and social network fragmentation!

  • by srgseg on 10/18/13, 11:24 PM

      It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide
    Looks like they're hitting critical mass. I love the idea that this is liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers that our taxes are paying for.

    I'm also delighted that Khosla Ventures are giving this room to breathe. "Khosla does appear to be increasingly open to investing in startups that have a social mission and a business model. This is often referred to as 'impact investing'"

  • by frabbit on 10/18/13, 11:49 PM

    I don't know whether it's Rao's write-up or not but this sounds like absolute rubbish written by yet another "business management" "consultant".

    Is Hacker News about hacking or about lame web-2.0 bubble business bullshit?

  • by afandian on 10/18/13, 11:03 PM

    Worth mentioning Orcid.org. Solves broadly the same problem. No need to get profit involved.

  • by dobbsbob on 10/19/13, 3:27 AM

    This places some of our greatest resources into a closed box not available to the general public.

  • by philip1209 on 10/18/13, 11:42 PM

    How does one obtain a .edu domain name?

  • by jlebrech on 10/19/13, 7:43 AM

    I thought that was how facebook started

  • by shaohua on 10/19/13, 6:05 AM

    April fool?