Academia.edu, The Social Networking Platform For Researchers, Raises $11 Million

So, is anybody here <i>actually</i> active on academia.edu? Asking, since as a computer vision researcher (3D reconstruction, obstacle recognition&#x2F;identification, augmented reality, ...) I am constantly looking for scientific resources, and to be frank, it is quite annoying because it can become really time consuming.<p>So a genuine question, is the site worth signing up for? I remember when mendeley just started, there was lots of excitement about it, mainly because it was sort of marketed as <i>the last.fm of research</i> (giving you <i>good</i> recommendations for <i>your</i> scientific interests), but then it turned out to be just <i>meeh</i> (getting bought by Elsevier didn&#x27;t help much ;-).<p>Also, on a side note, are there any other good sites doing something similar out there (like a reddit&#x2F;HN for <i>insert your research interests here</i> type of site) that are actually any good? I&#x27;m sure there must be a lot of other researchers active on HN...

Still kind of shitty - you have to log in to view or download anything. Google scholar is much more useful and open.

It&#x27;s all fun and games until we someone asks what&#x27;s the DAU&#x2F;MAU on that puppy. How many of those are actually active and what are they actually doing when they login.

How did it get a .edu domain? Is it an accredited institution?

after Mendeley I&#x27;m not going anywhere near something like this. and seriously, isn&#x27;t the web itself the best publishing mechanism ever invented? why are we trying to fit everything into a single service provider model? academic makes webpage using awful html and notepad with copies of their articles. other researchers track the people they&#x27;re interested in. RSS? not my !@##@ problem, use a site checker plug-in. it&#x27;s free, extendable and has no lock-in risks. the root cause problem here is academic promotion incentives almost force you into publishing behind paywalls.

How does this compare to researchgate? I know lots of people that use researchgate.net, but nobody I know uses academia.edu.

I&#x27;d love to see their business plan.<p>Academics on the whole are not a good demo for advertising and don&#x27;t want to pay for anything related to their jobs&#x2F;research unless they have absolutely no other choice. How are they going to make money? I can&#x27;t even see them being a good acquisition.

IMO the only useful thing about A.edu is that they have a good position in search engines and give you an information about clicks -- so it&#x27;s like Google Analytics for your papers and profile. The rest is sadly either cumbersome or redundant.