Academia.edu

We have been working hard recently, and have released some new features, and have also made some behind-the-scenes changes to make the site load faster.

We are also looking to hire an exceptional software engineer to join the Academia.edu team. Here are some details on the job:

Software Engineer
Academia.edu has a strong engineering culture. We are very focused on deploying high quality code, and building a great platform for academics to share research. Our goal is for every academic in the world to use Academia.edu to keep track of what is going on in their research area.

The full description of the software engineering position is here:

http://www.academia.edu/jobs/software_engineer

Below are the first few lines of the description:

“Professional qualities – you are:

• An exceptional engineer: you are able to innovate at the cutting edge of web development to overcome the complex challenges that can arise.
• Product and user experience focused: you are obsessed with creating a great product, and a great user experience. You feel anguish and pain when your site is slow, or when your user interface or feature is bad, and you feel pleasure when the site is fast and intuitive.
• A problem solver: you derive huge intellectual satisfaction from solving problems. You are always focused on finding the best and quickest solution to the problem you are working on.
• Technically ambitious: you are the kind of person who enjoys pushing the boundaries of the technologies you work with. For example, when thinking about the best UI for a feature, you would have no fear in considering creating a new JavaScript framework, if that is what is required to make it work right.”

You can read the full job description at
http://www.academia.edu/jobs/software_engineer.

Our overall jobs page, which gives an overview of the company, is here http://www.academia.edu/jobs.

We are a venture-capital-backed startup, based in San Francisco. There are three of us on the team at the moment, and we have attempted to describe the culture of the company in the links above. As a venture-funded startup, we are paying a market rate salary, and are generous with stock options. If you are interested in learning more, please email Richard Price at richard@academia.edu.

New Features
We have also been adding new features to Academia.edu:

• The News Feed is now the homepage when you are logged in, and it loads much faster
• On the left of the News Feed you can see the latest people, papers and status updates in your research areas
• You can now like and comment on status updates, and other News Feed stories
• You can now see extra information about the search keywords people use to find your page: your rank on the search engine for that keyword, and the country where the search came from
• There is a new and better interface for editing your research interests

Visit www.academia.edu to see these features!

Thanks, and best of luck for this academic year.
The Academia.edu Team

We’ve been working hard over the past few weeks pushing new features live to Academia.edu. We are really pleased with them, and here is an overview:

Follow

• You can now ‘Follow’ academics on Academia.edu. Following someone means that you will get their updates in your News Feed. The default News Feed is now composed of people you are following, your contacts, and people in your department. This is designed so that the News you get is relevant to you.
• You can also go to the ‘Research Interests’ tab on the News page and view the news from any research interest
• To follow people, visit www.academia.edu and click ‘Follow’ on people’s profile boxes. To see your News Feed, visit www.academia.edu/News

Back button

• Now, if you click on a profile from the tree diagram, and click ‘back’ in your browser, you’ll get taken back to the place you were at before in the tree.

Small things

• We’ve re-ordered the University listings so that University of X now appears in the ‘X’ section rather than in the ‘U’ section. In the ordering we also disregard things like ‘College of..’, ‘School of..’ and some other standard words.
• You can hide the ‘Post to Facebook’ link on your profile page. To do this, hover over the link and click ‘hide’. (This ‘hide’ link is for your own benefit – other people don’t see the ‘Post to Facebook’ link on your page).

What we are working on now

• Speed. We’ve made some changes to the site to make it faster, and we are working on more changes to speed it up.
• More controls for Facebook Connect, so you can control when the Facebook Connect box appears, and opt-out of Facebook Connect if you want.
• Research Interest tree. We are working on enabling people to re-organize the research interest tree, so that people can move around research interests to their correct places, if they have been wrongly placed initially.

To start following people, visit www.academia.edu and click ‘Follow’ on people’s profile boxes on the tree. There is a fun effect when you click ‘Follow’!

The Academia Team