Facebook for academics is here

A couple of smart people have started the service that I’ve been speculating about for months: academia.edu. Maybe I’ll too optimistic, but I think the concept has immense potential. People outside of academia tend to have a different perspective, but life inside the ivory towers comes with all sorts of special cultural rules and requirements and therefore a service specifically for academics makes sense in my view.

The ability to add publications is in itself a nice perk and it could make academia.edu a huge repository over time, provided that enough people use it. Exciting stuff.

Edit: I already anticipate people asking me whether I’ve lived under a rock for the past months (which I have in a sense, considering PhD work). From the stats page it looks like academia.edu has been around for a bit…

Edit 2: As Lambert Heller points out the service has probably not grown organically, but is likely to be the result of harvesting existing social networks. Still, the Google rankings of the profile pages on academia.edu alone are impressive.

I wonder how this ties in with things such as identification services (see the discussion here) and (as mentioned above) repositories. I think an SN for academics has the potential to get all of these things taken care of in a single go. Our mistake to date has been to think that researchers are interested in ID services or repositories in their own right, but I’m not really convinced that they are. A social network-style index where I can browse institutions, departments, research areas and colleagues, all aggregated in one place – that is something that has intrinsic value to academics. And technologists, librarians and administrators could sneak in features like ID services, optimal archiving and indexing of papers etc that are important on the larger scale of things, but that researchers don’t generally pay a lot of attention to.