A new startup social networking site is deploying some old ideas to connect academics from around the world. Ars explores Academia.edu to see if it could turn into Facebook for academics.

    * You can find people with similar research interests to you
    * You can keep track of the latest developments in your research area - the latest papers, talks, blog posts and status updates
    * You can create an easy-to-maintain academic webpage, listing your research interests and any papers you have written. A sample webpage is here: http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice

Richard Price wandered about for three years searching for someone who would understand the problems he had… with his research. Then, one fateful day in 2007, he found that special someone—a fellow philosopher working on the same question. Like many good scientific quests, the end of Price’s search for a kindred academic spirit raised another question: "Isn't there a better way to find fellow researchers?"

For Price, the answer was "yes," but the long answer was still over a year away. Frustrated by the past three years, heartened after finding a new colleague, and inspired by sites like Facebook, he started building his own social networking site for academics. The result was Academia.edu, which launched earlier this week and promises an open and discipline-agnostic way to connect faculty, post-docs, and graduate students using an old concept, the family tree.

Academia.edu doesn't seek to be all things for all academics, but it certainly tries. "The goal for Academia.edu is to provide a news feed for all the academic activities that are going on in your research area," Price told Ars.

"Sites like Facebook track social news," he noted, pointing out the flaws he saw in existing social networks. "The Facebook news feed doesn't contain academic information—it doesn't provide a research-focused feed on the latest conferences, papers, people and blog posts in a particular research area. LinkedIn is the same."

A genealogy of academia

To differentiate themselves, Price and his partners have merged the social network concept with aspects of academic genealogy. The Mathematics Genealogy Project pioneered the idea of outlining academic relationships on the web over a decade ago, and since then other disciplines have started their own family trees. Academia.edu merges these two popular concepts into one promising, but still rough implementation.

The genealogy influence is apparent the first moment you visit the site. A scroll bar at the top scrubs through myriad universities, and clicking on a university displays the departments entered by users. After you drill through the department layer, faculty, post-docs, and graduate students appear. Users may add themselves (of course) and others they know. Privacy advocates may raise a red flag over the ability to add other individuals, although such information is typically available on university websites. Academia.edu also allows users to add departments within universities. The site's open-ended approach ensures a more complete family tree, but it will likely need more permissions and controls as it grows.

Personal profile pages appear strikingly sparse compared to some of the design debacles on MySpace. This certainly helps Academia.edu live up to its research-centric image, but profiles could use more flexibility. For example, there is not a section to chart undergraduate advisors, PhD advisors, or post-doctoral labs—a true academic lineage. Research staff and associates will also find the site limiting, as the current nomenclature only allows for faculty, post-docs, and graduate students.

The interface, while unique, could also stand for more polish. Departments grow like roots below the universities, but some roots extend far beyond the edges of the browser window. To explore these "hidden" nodes, you must click and drag the background, a user interface I did not find immediately intuitive. Also, the distinctive tree-like interface does not carry over to contacts outside a department. Exploring these relationships through a web-like interface like Visual Thesaurus might make the site more compelling.

Academia.edu is still young, and there certainly seems to be a lot of promise beyond its initial foray into academic social networking. Price only began working on the site full time in September 2007, and during its brief alpha test and even shorter public availability, it has managed to place more than 70,000 academics on the tree. As with all social networking sites, Academia.edu's value will likely grow as its user-generated content swells.