<a href="http://www.academia.edu" rel="nofollow">http://www.academia.edu</a> is a Facebook/MySpace style site for academics. It launched in alpha version last week. <p>It's a site where academics can create an academic webpage, and upload their papers and research interests. You can see a sample webpage here: <a href="http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice" rel="nofollow">http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice</a><p>We have also built a paper-tracking engine that tracks the latest papers uploaded to the web in a given field. You can see the results for Computer Science here: <a href="http://cs.academia.edu/categories/2/papers" rel="nofollow">http://cs.academia.edu/categories/2/papers</a><p>Academia.edu's founder is Richard Price. Richard's previous ventures include <a href="http://www.liveout.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.liveout.co.uk</a> and <a href="http://www.peopleradar.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.peopleradar.com</a> (the #1 Facebook API application - recent page views per day have been around 1 million).<p>Richard is looking for a technical co-founder to join Academia.edu. He's looking for someone who:<p>- Is super smart - awesome at problem-solving. <p>- Is super driven - pushes themselves, and everyone else, to meet high standards.<p>The site is built in Rails and C#. Knowledge of those is a plus, but not essential. <p>The team is based in SF. We're offering a significant equity stake, and a competitive salary. We want to be surrounded by super smart people, all of whom are driving each other to create a great product for our users. We'll pay out whatever equity it takes to hire the most brilliant people. If you are interested, please contact richard@academia.edu.
This is an interesting idea. I wonder how you will grow it? Most University IT departments are understaffed and overworked. Even though they <i>should</i> provide these services, they often can't. Are you planning to charge universities for providing this service?<p>It seems to me as if academia.edu has plans to provide library services. Personally, I don't like the commercialization of libraries, especially when library scientists are coming up with excellent solutions (like <a href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/" rel="nofollow">http://xxx.lanl.gov/</a> .)<p>Either way, there are many directions academia.edu can go, must be an exciting time for you. Good luck.
I go to McGill and our email addresses end with .ca, I think similarly for some other universities in Canada. Interestingly, mcgill.edu does go to mcgill.ca (not emails though, I tried).