We used to enable users to be contacts with other users, and to follow their work. People didn’t always understand the difference between contacts and following. The difference was that contacts was a two-way relationship, so both parties had to confirm the connection. Following is a one-way relationship: you can follow someone’s work without them having to approve that. The idea behind having two connections was that ‘contacts’ were for people you know, whereas ‘following’ is for people whom you don’t know, but whose work you are interested to follow.
Users found it confusing to have these two kinds of connection. They often weren’t sure what the difference was between contacts and following, and even if they were, they weren’t always sure whether they wanted to be contacts with someone, or to follow them, so the experience wasn’t ideal. We decided to to merge ‘contacts’ into ‘following’, so now all connections between users on Academia.edu are ‘following’ ones. Existing contact connections have been converted into following connections, where both users are following each other.
The goal of Academia.edu is to help you find people in your research area, and keep in touch with them via the News Feed. Hopefully this change makes the site easier to use, and makes it easier for you to keep up with people in your research area.
December 17, 2009 at 8:13 am |
I can understand the reason behind the change.
Just wondering if it would have been possible to notify users in advance, rather than after the fact.
Or better yet, explaining the difference between Contacts and Following when you set up the site (e.g. via a What is This? link on the form).
Thanks!
December 17, 2009 at 9:19 pm |
To be honest, it was better before.
I thought that the difference between “contacts”, “following” and “followers” was self-evident. Perhaps it might have been better to explain these features to people who did not understand them rather than change them regardless of whether people liked them or not.
No matter. It is all part of the vogue to simplify rather than to educate.
December 18, 2009 at 1:58 pm |
It was better before, it was really academic, now it makes no sense.
December 18, 2009 at 3:03 pm |
This is a retrograde step, and one that will certainly restrict the potential of the academia.edu network for future growth.
All academics are familiar with the notion of “contacts” (an equal relationship) and this facility was previosuly well-used within the site. It is the notion of “following” (a sycophantic concept) that I had difficulty with, and not surprisingly, few subscribers made use of this.
I fear that the academia.edu team have misunderstood the source of subscribers’ confusion and ironically done away with the very part of the site which provided the main motivation for subscribing to it in the first place. It would have made far more sense to retain the “contacts” facility and simply to have removed the confusing “following” concept entirely.
I appeal to the team to restore the “contacts” facility without which (for me) the site loses much of its attraction. I think my profile demonstrates that, until now, I have supported the site more than most. However, I will be making no further use of it until this facility is restored.
December 18, 2009 at 3:42 pm |
I think it was better before too. I follow people who aren’t contacts, and I’m contacts with people I don’t follow. The distinction was valuable, and academically meaningful. Losing it diminishes the value of Academia.Edu. If there’s any hope of restoring it, I’m in favour.
It seems like it would have been worth trying to fine tine the help documents, and dialogue boxes that come up when adding contacts or opting to follow someone. Or at least having some kind of poll or wider discussion first.
December 18, 2009 at 7:57 pm |
I would also support the idea of restoring ‘contacts.’ The distinction between contacts and following is clear and this change removes one of the most useful facilities of the Academia.edu site — i.e. keeping track of your contacts at other universities.
If the problem is that people did not understand the difference between contacts and following, then I would suggest offering explanations as to the implied relationship when they make that choice. The explanation above is actually very clear:
“The idea behind having two connections was that ‘contacts’ were for people you know, whereas ‘following’ is for people whom you don’t know, but whose work you are interested to follow.”
Having only the ‘following’ option may make sense for Twitter but that is not how I use Academia.edu.
January 9, 2010 at 6:46 pm |
I totally agree.
December 19, 2009 at 12:17 am |
I was clear on the difference between contacts and following but unclear as to why I could sign up to follow one of my contacts and not another one. I would have been quite content with more detailed Help files and FAQs.
December 19, 2009 at 9:05 am |
I had no problem understanding the difference, previously, and I don’t like the new system. Any chance it can be put back the way it was? No real academic value now…
December 19, 2009 at 12:31 pm |
Am I the only one who finds it highly amusing to suddenly have a number of “followers”? I never thought of myself as a sect leader before.
Other than that, I think I’d be in favor of keeping contacts and followers apart, but I don’t feel strongly about it.
December 19, 2009 at 1:02 pm |
I agree with the majority of the comments. Following is not confusing. Contacts should be restored. I think the explanation provided in the announcement would suffice to clarify the distinction when reinstated. It is more misleading to refer to the relationship as “Following”, a concept based (I presume) on new social media websites that many of the (older?) users might not understand (e.g., what’s a tweet?). Not allowing users to actively manage the people they express and maintain a connection with is a poor choice. I will continue to use the site, but would like to have more of that control back. If you need to simply the issues for us nerds then I suggest getting rid of following as most people seem to follow people in their research interests (notices they would’ve gotten anyway).
December 19, 2009 at 6:29 pm |
This feature was fine the way it was, and kept these things purposeful; the merge has rendered these features albeit useless. This really should have been addressed with more thought….
December 19, 2009 at 8:44 pm |
It was better before, now the merge makes no sense.
December 19, 2009 at 11:34 pm |
I agree with those who find the old system better. Honestly, I am getting confused…For example I want to know if I am following someone and he/she is following me or not. The way this is set-up doesn’t give me that option…
December 20, 2009 at 3:00 am |
The distinction between contact and follow was clear and useful. It is too bad academia.edu chose to drop it.
December 20, 2009 at 4:23 am |
It was much better before, and makes little sense now. You should at least change the name from Followers” to “Contacts” even if you keep the rules/dynamic of the relationships the same.
December 20, 2009 at 6:59 am |
keep contacts and followers separate. frankly, ‘followers’ sounds way too much lik stalking to me! contact means there is reciprocal attention, even if it is just to be polite.
December 20, 2009 at 11:20 am |
The people have spoken. Will the webmaster or followers of the webmaster hear?
December 21, 2009 at 12:36 am |
Well, let me disagree with all the comments and support this change. I use Academia.edu to find out who is doing what (especially in areas removed from my own specialty). I don’t feel the need to have “contacts,” which seems like more of a social networking connection. I stay in touch with my contacts through email, not through this site. If people want social networking, they can use Facebook. If people want to find out what others are doing professionally, then Academia.edu has potential. It think that dropping contacts moves Academia.edu up a notch professionally, farther from Facebook and more toward professionalism.
What is REALLY NEEDED is improved searching capability. Until we can do “and” and “or” searches, this site will remain very awkward to use. Instead of pigeonholing people into set categories and then having other try to guess what categories are used, we should be able to search for people the way its done on most other internet sites and services.
January 9, 2010 at 6:53 pm |
I agree, the search stuff that you mention is missing. But I also like to have contacts and followers by separate (not all my academic friends are in Facebook).
December 21, 2009 at 2:18 am |
It was better before, no doubt about it.
December 21, 2009 at 3:14 am |
just adding one more voice to strongly support a separate contacts from following list!!
December 21, 2009 at 7:37 am |
So 19 out of 20 comments (so far) are clearly in favour of restoring the contact/follower distinction, and the other (the first) suggests measures that might have helped it do better with some users in the first place.
I wonder if this will make any difference.
Just yesterday a former student who went on to graduate work in a different discipline accepted what was once a ‘contact’ request from me. Except now I’m apparently ‘following’ him (which is nonsense – I’m not interested in what he workks on) and he’s ‘following’ me which he isn’t either.
It’s a no brainer:
[a] when x follows y, x is of the view that y’s research is of interest, and wants to know about new publications etc. Crucially, the relationship need not be reciprocal.
[b] when x and y are contacts, they actually know each other. This relationship is reciprocal.
And they’re just not the same thing. Abandoning the distinction is a dumbing down, facebookification. What’s next? Zombies vs. Pirates?
December 21, 2009 at 11:56 am |
Please restore our contacts to us! Followers is a dumb concept. Go on, do it for Christmas.
December 21, 2009 at 12:04 pm |
Drop “Following” entirely; we’re all making Contacts, as we should be, senior, junior, and in between. Snobbishness has a precarious toehold on the Internet, where very few people know that you’re a purebred Border Collie.
December 21, 2009 at 12:06 pm |
BTW – I don’t know how to make a new request, so bear with me: Can we have an “Emeritus Faculty” added, so people will know that some of us aren’t doing any hiring or threatening other people’s jobs, we’re just having fun in so-called retirement, perhaps adjuncting for pleasure….?
December 21, 2009 at 12:59 pm |
It was certainly better before, the distinction is valuable to maintain. Please restore it.
December 21, 2009 at 3:08 pm |
@ John McLaughlin: I don’t agree. Following (in the abandoned sense distinct from being a contact) is nothing to do with snobbishness. I ‘follow’ the work of people who are important in the fields I try to research. It’s not snobbery on my part to call someone else important, and since the one followed doesn’t get to be asked to be followed in the first place, it isn’t snobbery on their part either. (A young paleontologist decides to follow the work of Simon Conway Morris, who s/he does not know personally. Who is the snob here?)
December 21, 2009 at 3:29 pm |
I have always been puzzled about the category of “contacts.” I can’t figure out how this was useful on Academia.edu. Now maybe the answer is obvious to those of the Facebook generation, but just how is this a useful category? If I want to stay in contact with someone, I will email them. I use Academia.edu to “follow” some people, and to make it possible for other people to “follow” me in the sense of getting access to some of my papers or my website. Why would I need a separate category of “contact”?? Simplification is a good thing, and perhaps it will allow Academia.edu to concentrate on improving what needs to be improved (e.g., searching). What I want from Academia.edu is the spread of professional information, particularly beyond the small intellectual realms where we already know that is going on. I am not interested in this site for social networking.
December 22, 2009 at 11:03 am |
Great idea, the contact-version never worked for me, but the following thing is…because it has a much lower threshhold. Others do the linking much better, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. I would recommend a link to the latter though in addition to the Facebook connection.
December 22, 2009 at 6:49 pm |
I agree, I’m an impudent son of a bishop to impute snobbery to people I’ve never met. I still think it’s time to loosen up; I’m not on Facebook myself, coz I’m too busy with a half-dozen other lists, email etc, and this Academia.edu thing is a novel flood in my inbox; also, I’m emeritus (70 years old), so who needs the additional work, right? I still say, lighten up, welcome the new guys and quit putting up barriers to one another and across our various fields. Life’s too short for one-upmanship.
My tuppence, anyway – John at http://www.thedigitalfolklife.org
December 23, 2009 at 12:41 pm |
Have to agree with Paul Chynoweth and the others. I much prefered ‘contacts’. It would have made much more sense to me if you’d got rid of ‘following’.
December 23, 2009 at 2:41 pm |
I dislike the word “follower” which has connotations of both “fan” and “stalker” but that is undoubtedly a semantic oddity on my part. But I don’t like, not having followed anyone (I can research work in my own interest areas when I need to). being turned into a “follower” without having been consulted. Happily, I am connected by choice only to one former student of mine, but as we are Facebook connections and as we communicate by email, being a “follower” of his seems ludicrous. I would prefer the old format and I think changes that reflect users’ status should be discussed with users before the fact and not after.
December 24, 2009 at 6:30 pm |
I’ll reiterate what several people have mentioned above about preemptive information and education. Please do it in the future. I think it has been Academia’s consistent weak point in other areas too.
Part of this is an issue that conflicts facebook and windows users everywhere: the organization does not announce the changes in advance before implementing them and doesn’t provide choices for users to maintain their user experience or explore the new modifications. On the other hand, simply providing users information to allow them to learn the interface of the service would also be beneficial and may even be easier to do.
Examples in Academia:
When inviting colleagues, I was not aware that an automated message would be sent on my behalf rather than a personal message, which can be irritating when someone receives a cookie cutter message and invitation.
Several of my colleagues of the non-facebook generation would like some guide to the site as they feel it’s a little too simple for them to intuitively begin using it. A link that says “what’s this” or a tutorial would be beneficial to newcomers.
Others decided against using the site because they thought the initial prompt for e-mail address and password was a phishing scam. In this case, it’s an issue of oversimplification without sufficient information.
December 24, 2009 at 10:16 pm |
I believe the change is counterproductive and does not improve the site
December 25, 2009 at 6:06 am |
I understood the former system clearly. A person became a contact when I knew them personally or invited them to join the website. A person became a follower when their interest in me was purely professional; they wanted to keep up with my work for a period of time (or vise versa). I agree with the comments expressing that the change has made the site less personal, less precise.
I have been encouraging my colleagues in other disciplines to sign up. They are (or will be) contacts that I want keep up with for purely personal and collegial reasons. I am not interested in following them (or their research) so to speak.
For scholars like me, this website hovers between the social and the professional; and the old way was better for keeping that clear.
On this one, three cheers for the majority! And Merry Christmas to all!
CLF
December 26, 2009 at 6:16 am |
It beggars belief that individuals who have managed to study at Postgraduate level and beyond (many of whom are indeed practicing academics) do not understand the simple concepts behind ‘contacts’ and ‘following’. To try to imply that individuals are confused by the two is ridiculous.
Don’t diminish the standards that you set out with when starting up this website. This is not facebook and those who wish to join it are probably already on it. You have your own unique audience … for now! Those who do not like the change to ‘followers’ and ‘following’ instead of ‘contacts’ and ‘following’ or additions that try to turn it in to an academic version of facebook will simply cease to use the site, and eventually you will lose your client/customer base. That will be a real shame.
Why not send out an email to all users with a simple survey to gauge opinion. This should have been done prior to the change, but better late than never and better now than if you take a step too far in future and your target audience simply dissipates. Trying to regain their confidence and your credibility will be difficult.
I wish you well.
DE Folan
December 27, 2009 at 12:27 am |
I agree with those who think the category of Contacts is a useful one. And while I appreciate Michael E. Smith’s point of view on the matter, it seems that a reinstated Contacts classification would not hinder his or others’ use of the site (i.e. they could simply have no contacts if they wish), while its presence is clearly missed. Certainly a significant majority of those who’ve expressed an opinion so far miss it.
December 27, 2009 at 2:22 pm |
I too agree that the previous configuration worked best, and that the problem may have been more architecture-related. For example: how do people go about understanding and learning to use Academia.edu’s unique features?
I also agree with the many comments that following fills a research, academic need. The contacts function allowed for conventional social networking, which not only was a valuable part Academia.edu, but a good complement to following.
I’m curious as to how Academia.edu reached the conclusion that the contacts/following features were misunderstood by users. Perhaps it would be appropriate to implement a more robust method for understanding the user needs. A forum?
December 27, 2009 at 3:15 pm |
I agree with Paul: the “following/followers” feature was always stupid. It is no less stupid for being merged with the otherwise-sensible “Contacts” feature. Drop the following crap, leave the contacts.
December 28, 2009 at 4:18 am |
Besides the previous arguments, “following” is prone to a version of spamming, since the updates of my “followers” (which I can´t control) appears in my personalized home page. Probably you have noticed some “users” following you and hundreds, even thousands of people. This can ruin the whole idea of this very good site. If “folllowing/followers” is the only option remaining, I would really appreciate a “block this user” addition to the available utilities.
December 28, 2009 at 9:41 am |
The features should definitely be kept separate, as before.
To Michael Smith: First, apparently many people like the “contacts” feature. So the fact that a (I am guessing) minority do not have a use for it isn’t a good reason to eliminate it: those who don’t want to use it, don’t have to.
As for what the point of it is: Many of us know people in academia that we do not keep in regular e-mail contact with. It is nice to have these people listed as contacts. As pointed out by others, above, we may have contacts whose work we are not interested in following. Moreover, lists of contacts and lists of people one follows convey different kinds of information, the sort of information that might be relevant to someone’s academic self-presentation. (Some have mentioned that Facebook and LinkedIn are better at this. Maybe. But LinkedIn isn’t an academic site, and not set up to convey the same sorts of things; it is handy to have one’s academic information and academic contacts in the same place. Second, ditto for Facebook. But moreover: as a graduate student, I am perfectly comfortable adding my peers as Facebook “friends”; but I would not want to add, say, established professors as such, since I want to be able to use my Facebook profile for features of my life beyond academia.)
Finally: A number of people do seem to object to the “following” feature. Again, they don’t have to use it. But this feature is just as helpful as the “contacts” feature. The real problem seems to be with the name: “following” seems to convey negative connotations, because it makes it seem like you are following a person rather than a person’s work. So while the “contacts” and “following” features should be split up again, perhaps the latter needs to be renamed to make it more user friendly. I confess, however, that I don’t at the moment have a good idea of what to rename it to. Suggestions?
December 28, 2009 at 1:46 pm |
Ok, good initiative.Thanks.
December 28, 2009 at 4:33 pm |
Previous system was absolutely better. I totally agree with the former comments about understanding the difference. I don’t want to be contacts most of the time, I just want to follow the works. On the side of old system..
December 29, 2009 at 12:32 am |
Count me as another who feels this change serves no real purpose, and removes a useful distinction. Of course, I’m not entirely certain as of yet that this site will ultimately be all that useful anyway. It does seem like it could be, but this move makes it less appealing straightaway.
December 29, 2009 at 12:57 am |
I agree that contacts and followers should be separate.
-We could approve/disapprove contacts. Those were people that I personally knew (i.e. I had contact with them).
-There was a difference between them and it seem that most people I know were aware of the difference. Just because a few people couldn’t figure it out doesn’t mean that they should have been merged.
One possible change that could have been made would have been to make contacts private and leave “followers” visible to the public.
Just my two cents. I hope that they bring back the “contacts” feature.
December 29, 2009 at 3:50 pm |
Long past time for an up-or-down vote and get on with life as she is lived. We can all handle the distinction, obviously. Some of us want to keep the follower at arm’s length; some of us could care less; some of welcome the newbies, having been them not so long ago. What would a subscribers’ poll look like? And does it matter enough at this late date? C’mon, guys…. I got commas to locate….
December 29, 2009 at 7:16 pm |
For a long time I did not comment any aspect of Academia.edu. Beforhand, each time I suggested something, I was answered that Academia.edu staff was overloaded and they did not have time to answer every bugs of the Website – which I understand well. Since they are so much negative comments on the new merged systems following–contacts, I dare to give here my opinion – which is pretty much the same than the other hereinbefore.
I never used the followers/followed system. In French, it sounds more like Master/disciple type of relationship [suiveur-leader, maître-disciple: more accurate for the schoolyard of an elementary school]. But despise this weird choice of vocabulary, I can understand the use of it. So hereafter could be my suggestion for a new system, respecting, I think, the precedent messages:
[1] The re-establishment of the contact-system as it was before (necessiting the consent of the other part in order to be public);
[2] The re-establishment of the following-system, but with a betterment:
[2 bis] Possibility to do not have the name published, like it is the case of the “keywords section” [or if you absolutely want to know who is popular in the schoolyard, you could publish the number of "followers", without the names"]. Of course, the person followed can have access to who is the follwers;
[3] Every future major changes should be announced and discussed beforehand.
December 30, 2009 at 2:36 am |
I would also like “contacts” restored for the reasons others have mentioned.
December 30, 2009 at 2:09 pm |
I’m told Facebook has a similar distinction, between Fans and Friends, between musicians and well, contacts & followers, for contacts there (I’m experimenting with it, with guidance); for Friends, ya gotta ask to be “Friended” but I think Fans just identify themselves as such and the musician gets to boaast of how many Fans s/he has..
Anything that helps, nothing that doesn’t. How many comments does it take to get things changed/restored/dropped here? Does this road go on forever…?
Just asking…. – John
http://www.thedigitalfolklife.org
December 30, 2009 at 6:56 pm |
I am not clear where this change is headed…the old way worked better. Now it’s difficult to find academic value in this ‘merger’
December 31, 2009 at 10:21 am |
Agreed with most commentators here–it was much better to have contacts and following before. In fact, if any change was to be introduced I would have gotten rid of following and maintained contacts–a much more usual type of relationship in academic circles.
December 31, 2009 at 4:42 pm |
I prefer the old distinction as well.
December 31, 2009 at 7:49 pm |
Everyone that I know could easily distinguish between contacts and followers. It’s not a difficult concept. Contacts was a very good feature of this site. The only change that I would have recommended would be to have the ability to hide contacts (same like the ability to hide keywords).
Please bring back the contacts feature.
January 1, 2010 at 6:34 am |
Please bring back contacts.
January 1, 2010 at 6:24 pm |
I was hoping that with all of the negative feedback these features would be restored to their previous useful states. I am not sure I like being a ‘follower’ of a list of people on my site and am considering dropping all of my contacts so that it doesn’t look so ridiculous, and just keep up with my contacts from Academia.com myself – OFF of the website! (this new merge does NOT make it easier to use and manage contacts!)
January 1, 2010 at 11:17 pm |
I am sincerely surprised that the distinction between contacts and follower hasn’t been restored given all the previous comments.
Contacts are people we know personally, but we are not necessarily following their work. They might even be working in research areas totally different from ours.
On the other hand, we do not need to know the people we follow, but for sure we are interested in their research.
Taking out the distinction, Academia.edu is deleting information that is crucial to understand the interests of any given person.
Many people reported this issue to the Academia.edu team, but the distinction has not been restored. Furthermore, I did not see any reply to the several messages posted here from members of the staff of Academia.edu. I regard this as a major failure of the Academia.edu team and I hope that the old features will be restored soon, or at least someone from the staff will address the issues reported here.
Cheers,
Stefano
January 2, 2010 at 10:45 am |
I also valued the contacts feature. The distinction between followers and contact was intuitive and useful. Please restore it. There is no need for everything to ape Twitter.
January 2, 2010 at 12:53 pm |
It seems that most commentators here find the recent change problematic and backward, and support the old distinction. Somewhat fewer, but many enough for it to matter also feel uneasy about the connotations of the word “follower”.
I don’t mind the word myself – I’m happy to be identified as a “follower” of the work of a scholar who is important in a field I’m interested in. But I can also see that it suggests less wholesome associations.
So two things:
(1) Is there a better term for “follower”? Would it be enough to let people “follow the work of ______”? (So it’s clear that it’s not the person?)
(2) Is anyone from Academia.edu actually listening, and does our discussing this have any chance of influencing policy? I’d like to know whether we’re wasting our time here.
January 3, 2010 at 2:59 am |
Beyond the distinction between following and contacts, I find it creepy that I can get a random email – from a ‘scholar’ I do not know – asking me to join this site. What is creepier is that when I join I find out this ‘scholar’ has asked *all* of the people in my department to join, as well as *many* members of numerous other departments in our field. What is still creepier is that any of us who decide to join are immediately *followers* of this ‘scholar’ we do not necessarily know (plus we now have to figure out how to stop following this ‘scholar’). The site’s OK, for sure, but I’m just sayin’…
January 4, 2010 at 9:06 am |
I agree with David Spurrett and many others before me – the distinction between Contacts and Followers makes sense – but the word, Followers was kind of weird. What about ‘Monitor’ – like you do with a class that you’re not enrolled in. Makes sense in the context and doesn’t confuse people you actually know and are in contact with, and people whom you’re interested in but don’t actually know.
January 4, 2010 at 9:49 am |
… or auditor.
January 4, 2010 at 10:43 pm |
I like “auditor”, and I would like to see the distinction between auditing someone’s work and contacting him or her maintained. Following sound jejeune, like tweeting.
January 5, 2010 at 1:59 am |
It would be convenient to know if the editors of academia.edu are really listening. A short note like “we are following this thread, and we are considering carefully the issue” would be nice. Otherwise, this discussion would be quite futile.
January 5, 2010 at 2:03 am |
I must say, the continued silence from the editors would be disheartening if not noteworty, considering how moderators of other email discussion list do respond in timely fashion to discussion topics, esp ones they have raised.
BTW – I finally succumbed to the comments on Facebook, and got onto it. It’s a delight, and not at all like the caricature of it given by some posters here. I hate to ask – don’t people on here do research before judgement? Sheesh.
January 5, 2010 at 2:25 am |
Re Facebook, it all depends on who your friends are as to what it’s like.
January 5, 2010 at 8:51 am |
How do I edit my profile so that I can, if I wish, conceal my e-mail address and also block certain individuals from ‘following’ me?
January 5, 2010 at 10:33 am |
Another variable is whether you know it second, third, or first-hand.
January 5, 2010 at 10:57 am |
It seems that the opinions on this are fairly uniform (though this might be due to self-selection) and the comments have kept on coming for close to a month now without any response from the editors. Harumph. I just wonder if they’ve dumped the information concerning who had been a contact and who was merely following, which would make it very hard to roll back the change.
January 5, 2010 at 11:39 am |
@John McLaughlin: I found facebook a delight at first, and I still use it. It’s not good for academic networking for a number of reasons including the fact that it is mostly populated by non-academics, and that it is open to deeply annoying clogging by users who install pointless third party applications. (Wait until your 50th invitation to become a zombie, or join a virtual war between pirates and ninjas…) The basic facebook ontology is people, photographs, events, web links, videos, etc. Not departments, publications, texts of papers, etc.
What made Academia.edu intially seem like such a a great idea to me was that unlike facebook the architecture was oriented towards things that academics cared about. It was also usefully closed to academics (I agree with your earlier point about the need for an ‘emeritus’ category).
@ generally: It remains to be seen whether Academia.edu will pull in a high enough fraction of serious academics to become a genuine networking resource over and above email, which we have already. The extra things it has (papers, etc.) are a reason to adopt it, but I don’t know what the rate of growth is. And the internal messaging system is ghastly even compared to facebook – I’d reckon it would be better abandoned in favour of smart links that open the users default mail client. (I want my messages some place I can search and file them for a start, and to be able to include attachments.)
It also remains to be seen how Academia.edu might sustain itself as it grew. There’s a pile of bills that someone is going to have to pay, and I’m not sure who would. I’d guess that publishers (journals and books) would be interested in integrating with it, and that it might be able to generate revenue from royalties on content found through the site. But I don’t see users paying, and I’m not sure that publisher revenue would be enough.
(Oh, and I’ve used the ‘send a comment’ box to ask that some attention be paid to this thread.)
January 5, 2010 at 3:47 pm |
Reasoned response from someone who isn’t caricaturing Facebook. For my uses – networking with folk & BG musicians – it’s very useful, perhaps not so much for acanemics. I think the circles I’m moving in don’t indulge in zombie dances or ninja fights much; it’s a good way t catch up on traveling folkies, and I’ve got at least one folklore book I’ll be reviewing on my website (which combines my folkie interests and, to some extent, my academic, since I am, as noted, emeritus, and not much help to anyone in academia, thank God). Tell you the truth, I have more fun part-time teaching at a community college – veery different range of students, from brilliant/i,poverished to snotty/spoiled, than I ever in my life met before, and running my 30-yr-old weekly radio show than I’ve had in years, and FB is a lot more fun than, so far, this list – for me, not necessarily for other people at different stages of their careers/job-hunting etc.
But geez, I wish we could get some sign we’re not just talking to ourselves here, don’t you? Is there a light on in the Academia.edu office, do you think? Could somebody climb up a ladder and check to see if anybody’s home?
January 5, 2010 at 4:16 pm |
David Spurrett and John McLaughlin give a very accurate account of Facebook–it’s not academic in tone, although a person may have mainly academic FB friends. It can be very playful about teaching and research and the weird but interesting things people find online. It’s helped me get back in touch with old friends, say last goodbyes to one who was dying, cheer on a relative through a tough pregnancy, congratulate people on defending dissertations or getting jobs. Those aren’t things I expect or really want to do on Academia.edu, which I see as more of a professional face to the world.
January 5, 2010 at 8:08 pm |
I hate to say it, guys, but this has been too real an education in acanemia for me to stick around any longer. I’m outta here – Later – John
January 5, 2010 at 8:19 pm |
Hi all,
Thanks for all of your comments. We have been monitoring the discussion, and reading the comments closely since we put up the post. We haven’t weighed in before because we were keen to see what people’s natural first reactions were.
We are continuing to listen closely and will address points over the coming days.
Richard (CEO, Academia.edu)
January 17, 2010 at 6:57 pm |
Thanks Richard, we all look forward to seeing you address our concerns.
January 6, 2010 at 12:55 am |
Let me add one more voice for restoring the previous system. It was very helpful to be able to add people as contacts (those I know and interact with, but may not need or want to follow) and separately as people I follow (those I do not know personally but whose work I want to keep track of). Most of us should be able to take direction, at least with some gentle nudging.
January 6, 2010 at 8:59 pm |
I don’t like the change either and thought that the explanation of why it was made (without any consultation!) very unsatisfactory. There is clearly a difference between mutual following and being a contact. And I found the distinction between following and being a contact very useful. For example, I was a contact with quite a few people who are not in my discipline but the idea of mutually folloing one another seems strange.
I hope that the previous distinction can be restored.
January 7, 2010 at 12:16 pm |
When I came to academia.edu I thought: wow, finally a networking site that actually combines contacts and followers. I always thought it was stupid that other sites you had either or.
I don’t agree with the argument that people who want contacts should go to facebook or use email. I also don’t see why a feature is taken away just because a small minority (!) of users did not understand it.
But anyway: maybe a way to re-improve academia.edu would be to allow users to qualify which parts of another users profile one wants to be updated on? I might follow one persons publications, another’s reading list and yet another’s blog.
That choice should of course not be public, just a setting in ones own profile. Apart from that it would be helpful if users could chose what kind of information they want on their newsfeed (e.g. I am not interested to see what my contact’s departmental colleagues are doing).
January 9, 2010 at 9:39 am |
It’s not surprising there are so many expressions of horror about the change; people don’t like change, especially when they feel something has been taken away from them. I felt the same initially, but on reflection I don’t think much has been lost.
It’s better to contact people directly via email. In fact, one ‘contact’ asked if I would do this, and I think most of us would probably prefer that. Contact information can be included in the webpage, so if you want to contact someone just email them.
Finally, someone ought to respond to the rather silly comments about there being something sinister about being a follower or following someone. It clearly says ‘following the work of’. There’s nothing negative about that. On the contrary, it’s a very powerful way of creating a more international and interdisciplinary academic world. I can’t understand why users don’t use the following feature more.
On the reverse effect of having people follow your research interests, well if there’s some frisson to be had from knowing that some people are following your work, and therefore an incentive for you to keep them interested, surely that can only be a good thing. Academia.edu should be congratulated for encouraging people to be active researchers and curious about the research of others.
January 14, 2010 at 3:05 am |
Do not change, this is not facebook,thats why Iam here in the first place. keep it professional, I do not want to have contact with people I follow, I simply want to follow their work, purely academic reasons.
January 14, 2010 at 2:12 pm |
It did not always read “following the work of” and “work being follwed by” – this is a new addition. But that does not seem to be the main issue here.
I don’t think that the negative comments are about something changing or being taken away; they seem well-founded and considerately expressed. This innovation was an ill-considered one due to the distinction of these two different features being appreciated widely in this networking community and used such.
The main purpose of Academia.edu was to enjoy a networking tool specifically for those in academic fields. It remains better for that purpose than any of the other networking websites, I find, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others. I was very glad to find Academia.com and found that it functioned well for what I, and many other scholars, needed.
The key to this site being a specialised networking tool for scholars is the functionality that it allows. When that is changed in a way that inhibits or prevents networking the way that those who use the site require, then the usefulness of the site is diminished.
So I don’t think it is about being afraid of changes, nor did the distinction between ‘contacts’ and ‘following’ discourage scholars from being active researchers. I think that these reactions are well-founded, and that the function and use of these tools should really have been investigated before the decision was made to merge them.
January 15, 2010 at 6:12 pm |
I think this was a good change, as I was confused by the previous setting and can now easily understand how the new system works. This seems like a well thought through adjustment. Good work.
January 17, 2010 at 6:52 pm |
I also agree that it was unnecessary to remove Contacts altogether, simply because people were confused and asking questions. Asking questions should be encouraged in academia, not restricted.
I hope that the site administrators will consider re-instating Contacts and adding a user-friendly FAQ about the issue. I would recommend a clickable question mark right there on the profile next to the words “Following the Work of” and “Contacts” – so that people who may be confused can easily click the question mark to figure out what each category means.
In the future, academia.edu, I hope you will make changes to the site that improve ease of use and make it easier to connect with like-minded individuals, rather than restricting our choices.
January 22, 2010 at 11:57 am |
But, Stephanie, isn’t ‘following the work of’ demonstrably clearer than ‘following’ and ‘contacting’? And if it is, what’s the problem exactly, apart from academics feeling they haven’t been properly consulted? I just don’t get it. Why is contacting necessary when it’s just as easy to send an email?
January 24, 2010 at 9:17 am |
I’m not sure it is ‘just as easy’ at all. If I’m working in Academia.edu, I can just send a message directly. It’s not guaranteed that I’ll have an email client open, and I didn’t actually have the email addresses of some of the people who were among my Academia contacts. Because it is a closed network, Academia messages had no spam. On the downside, the Academia message engine was dreadful – worse than facebook.
Also, email addresses sometimes change – a person goes from a student to a staff email address, or something like that. (This is an genuine value of facebook – the connections are stable across changes of contact details.) I don’t know if Academia permits individuals to change institutions while keeping their networks otherwise stable, but if should.
Finally, the ‘contact’ list might have been of value in other ways to users of Academia.
January 26, 2010 at 4:20 pm |
Dear David, thanks for explaining. I’m still not convinced it’s needed, and think there may well be a majority who would rather not have the contact button, thinking email sufficient and anything else rather burdonsome or even intrusive. But at least I understand now a bit better why those who liked it feel they’ve had something useful removed. Might the change not encourage more people to join in though, now that it’s just very simply about being able to follow other people’s work and not a a Facebook substitute? I think many of the correspondents herer may be losing sight of the reason for the change, which surely had something to do with making academia.edu more attarctive to those who haven’t yet joined. Afterall, it would be so much more valuable if it had a much larger membership. I do think it’s easier to sell to colleagues now it’s been simplified.
January 26, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Reducing functionality to attract new members? Sorry, David, but I find this explanation totally unconvincing.
January 25, 2010 at 6:58 am |
Ok. So we have exactly one person who was confused by the previous system, though we don’t know how it was confusing. And a few people who don’t so much object to the old system, as simply didn’t have a use for the “contacts” section. Now it’s pretty clear that most people here do have a use for the contacts section, prefer it, and think it makes the site more professional. Those who don’t like the contacts section can simply not use it. Likewise for those who find it confusing. Why, exactly, are we still talking about this instead of getting our contacts back?
January 27, 2010 at 7:10 am |
The reason given wasn’t about drawing new users in – apparently some existing users “didn’t always understand the difference between contacts and following”. I saw no evidence of an attempt to explain or clarify the difference, instead we had functionality taken away without consultation from those who did understand. Frankly that seems idiotic to me – as though a few decades ago someone who made operating systems had decided to abandon folders because *some* users didn’t understand the difference between a file and a folder. Or abandoning HTTP because some folks didn’t realise that email and the web weren’t the same thing.
January 29, 2010 at 9:12 am |
Yes, the changeover was clumsily done, I don’t want to challenge that. But I stand by my words. The change will have been temporarily disadvantageous for some, especially if you had lots of contacts that were just friends really and you were using academia.edu for social networking purposes. But personally, I’d rather only use it for following people’s academic research. Why would I want to contact people whose work I didn’t understand or appreciate at all? I repeat, I can do that more easily and more appropriately by other means. In other words, I do think it’s very reasonable to suggest that the removal of contacts makes academia.edu a stronger, more academic facility. It’s less confusing, more streamlined, and much more focussed on the proper business of understanding each others’ academic work. I think it might, for example, encourage people to take the ‘what are you thinking right now?’ invitation much more seriously, so that we don’t have to read about trivial things such as someone’s worries about how many essays they have to mark, or suchlike. And, yes, I do think this will make it a lot more attractive to the many colleagues I know who would shrink in horror if asked to join a social networking site, but who might well join in if its a more vital, properly academic service, simply about exposing one’s own research and following the research of others. And this isn’t a trivial point. Academia.edu is still far from vital in that regard because not nearly enough academics have joined for it to be a serious tool for surveying what’s out there. I do realise mine’s a minority view though, don’t attack me too harshly!
January 27, 2010 at 11:27 am |
I think it’s also worth noting, and in a genuinely angry tone, that the consultation free conversion of contacts into mutual following relationships has saddled my page, and I don’t doubt many others, with outright falsehoods, and created a non-trivial problem of etiquette. I was a ‘contact’ with people who I knew for various reasons (including studying at the same place at the same time) but whose work means literally nothing to me. (Some of it is textual exegesis of ancient texts in languages I can’t read, for example.) It’s blatantly and outrageously false to say that I follow their work. I truly don’t understand it at all. But now I live with a page that claims I follow things I can’t read, and the burden of having to either (1) leave the falsehoods, or (2) delete them, and go round explaining to the people whose connections I drop that it isn’t personal, and how I’ve been forced into it by a daft policy change.
January 28, 2010 at 10:22 am |
I agree with the overwhelming majority that there is an obvious distinction between people you know and people whose work you follow, and that this distinction is important even for those who don’t wish to use both categories here.
To echo David Spurrett: “now I live with a page that claims I follow things I can’t read, and the burden of having to either (1) leave the falsehoods, or (2) delete them, and go round explaining to the people whose connections I drop that it isn’t personal, and how I’ve been forced into it by a daft policy change.”
January 28, 2010 at 9:59 pm |
I agree that the distinction is worth keeping/bringing back.
January 30, 2010 at 9:04 pm |
This feature was fine the way it was, and kept these things purposeful; the merge has rendered these features albeit useless. This really should have been addressed with more thought….
February 2, 2010 at 12:56 pm |
I don’t like the fact that all of a sudden people that were following my work, that I don’t even know them are “people that I follow”. You cannot change something like this when people are already using the system under a set of mutually agreed rules. I urge you to restore the system to the previous way. I liked Academina very much, but with this chage I started to considering canceling my account.
February 2, 2010 at 8:17 pm |
Some people seem to be under the impression that having contact on Academia.edu was just a social tool, but this is a narrow and silly stance to take. I used to have a select group of people, many with whom I am doing joint projects, conference panels and publications, that were contacts, and others whose work I was interested in and liked to know when and what they published next or might be working on, as it was relevant to my field. Now I just have one big jumbled-together group of followers and people I follow and have lost that distinction that to me was so useful in this academic networking tool. I don’t find that to have been a social tool at all, and if it was easier and more convenient to correspond about our academic work via contact on Academia.com, then we should not be told to “use your email if you want a Facebook!” That’s just stupid.
February 3, 2010 at 4:24 pm |
Hey, David Hulk, maybe some of us don’t want to put email addresses up for some reason or another, including changing addresses, and find it more convenient to contact our peers via Academia because of being on different continents!
February 4, 2010 at 7:58 pm |
Hi all,
Thanks for all your valuable comments. We have been reading them closely and discussing them amongst ourselves. We are going to keep the change, and have just the ‘follow X’s work’ connection. We feel that the value of Academia.edu is in following people’s research; our goal is for Academia.edu to be the best place to follow what is going on in your research area. We feel that this goal is best achieved with just one connection, the ‘follow X’s work’ connection. The ‘contacts’ relationship did not in fact add extra functionality – your News Feed showed news from both your contacts and people whose work you were following. Contacts helped with establishing who knew who, and whilst this information could be useful in certain circumstances, on balance we decided that the these benefits were outweighed by the costs of having two kinds of connection. Broadly speaking, to our minds, these costs were:
– often people would look at a profile and hesitate over whether to follow the person’s work or to add them as a contact, and this hesitation would often lead them to pursue neither course of action.
– having two connections made the site harder for people to explain to others. We hope that now people can describe Academia.edu as a place where you can follow the work of people in your field, and thereby keep up with the latest research.
We’re working hard on making Academia.edu as useful as possible to all academics, and we hugely appreciate all of your comments and input.
The Academia team – Richard Price, Ben Lund, Jarques Pretorius, Josh Fleming, Yuriy Mikhalevskiy, Dan Feusse
February 5, 2010 at 10:28 am |
That official comment from the Academia team is useful insofar as we know we can stop wasting our breath saying what we prefer, and explaining why we prefer it.
IMO the decision was still a cop out. “Some people were confused, so we opted for the lowest common denominator” is a poor basis for policy. This site is supposed to be a tool for *academics* who are supposed to accept complexity if it pays its way. We’d all hoot and slap our thighs if we heard the physics community announce that from now on everything was going to be called a particle, because some folks struggled with the distinction between waves and particles, etc., etc. Or if some people struggled with the “book/article” distinction, so all documents were going to be called “books” from now on.
I can’t help noticing that the comment doesn’t in any way address or even acknowledge the point made more than once that the change created a bunch of stupid falsehoods (claims about following) without warning or choice, and left the individual users saddled with the thus created nonsense to deal with the problem.
- Why not embark on a serious attempt to clarify the distinction, or enlist the support of the many users who could handle it to help?
- Why not give users warning about the change?
- Why not bother to spend the tiny effort needed to realise “contact” doesn’t mean “follows” *before* acting as though they were the same? (We keep getting given hearsay evidence about dumb users who didn’t understand, in defence of a policy change by people who don’t seem to respect the difference either.)
- Why not just drop contacts entirely, instead of treating them as what they weren’t?
- Why not give users a chance to review their list of contacts and chose which to convert to “following” links?
This reduces my confidence that being listed on Academia.edu is that good an idea.
February 9, 2010 at 4:31 am |
I think this was a very bad idea. There are people I’m happy to have follow me but I’m not that interested in following myself. Then there are people I’d love to follow who might not be so keen on following me. academia.edu is not a social network like facebook. This change should be reversed.
February 10, 2010 at 10:45 pm |
This is rather disappointing. It is silly to reduce the flexibility of this site this way; it changes the way I used to use Academia.edu. Knowing now that the site “team” don’t care, I have to go through my page and reorganise everything to compensate, and figure out how to keep my page useful to me after the loss of what I found to be a very helpful tool. Yes, it is quite disappointing. No stars for this, Academia.edu!