Academia.edu launches, a Geni For Researchers

How did these guys get a .edu domain? I thought only accredited colleges were allowed register those.

They've had it for quite a while.

yeah, i think they were grandfathered in. very cool ideas, i hope they do well. their UI seems a bit overcomplicated, though.

www.scilink.com is the only other player i know of sorta in this space (and labmeeting, as mentioned). anything better out there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_databases_and_search_e...

Of the search engines listed, I think Scopus and Web of Science both compete in the area of linking papers together by citations, but I don't really use either.

back in the day it was easier to register .edu domains, and they bought it from someone who'd owned it for a long time.

Yuck. A great reminder why you shouldn't use Flash to build a key navigation element of your site. This particular site is slow, and it behaves in very unexpected ways. Is there any advantage to using Flash in this situation?

I think that a simple nested list view would be more useful to browse departments. The tree is nice too, but not very practical at the current speed.

site's unusably slow (right now)

profs are just like you, they want to scope out hot chicks...which is why they will continue to use fb