We’ve been working hard over the past few weeks pushing new features live to Academia.edu. We are really pleased with them, and here is an overview:
Follow
- You can now ‘Follow’ academics on Academia.edu. Following someone means that you will get their updates in your News Feed. The default News Feed is now composed of people you are following, your contacts, and people in your department. This is designed so that the News you get is relevant to you.
- You can also go to the ‘Research Interests’ tab on the News page and view the news from any research interest
- To follow people, visit www.academia.edu and click ‘Follow’ on people’s profile boxes. To see your News Feed, visit www.academia.edu/News
Back button
- Now, if you click on a profile from the tree diagram, and click ‘back’ in your browser, you’ll get taken back to the place you were at before in the tree.
Small things
- We’ve re-ordered the University listings so that University of X now appears in the ‘X’ section rather than in the ‘U’ section. In the ordering we also disregard things like ‘College of..’, ‘School of..’ and some other standard words.
- You can hide the ‘Post to Facebook’ link on your profile page. To do this, hover over the link and click ‘hide’. (This ‘hide’ link is for your own benefit – other people don’t see the ‘Post to Facebook’ link on your page).
What we are working on now
- Speed. We’ve made some changes to the site to make it faster, and we are working on more changes to speed it up.
- More controls for Facebook Connect, so you can control when the Facebook Connect box appears, and opt-out of Facebook Connect if you want.
- Research Interest tree. We are working on enabling people to re-organize the research interest tree, so that people can move around research interests to their correct places, if they have been wrongly placed initially.
To start following people, visit www.academia.edu and click ‘Follow’ on people’s profile boxes on the tree. There is a fun effect when you click ‘Follow’!
The Academia Team
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January 27, 2010 at 7:14 am |
Here’s a new feature I’d like to see: Functionality for learned societies. I’d like people to be able to identify as members of them, and for the societies to have ‘sections’ of some sort on Academia.edu. So an individual’s page would include a “member of…” listing, and the group page could have documents on it like conference programmes, etc. It would take a bit of thinking to get this right – office holders in the society should be able to manage some content, and hand over to successors. It’s not obvious how best to do that, but I think it would add something to the specifically academic networking value of Academia.edu.