Academici.net

I guess it was a result of my post about an academic LinkedIn, I got invited to join Academici.net. It seems to be what I was talking about (I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't know about it), so I created a profile. While it is definitely more academic focused than LinkedIn, I still felt that it was a bit oriented towards getting a new job, and not so much around creating joint research proposals, or collaborative articles, or visiting fellowships, say.

It has a good feature set - to quote from the email:

An on-line journal to publish abstracts, drafts, papers or upload any kind of documents and the option to share them with contacts or keep them private through your privacy settings.

The ability to add your own personal bookmarks and share them with your contacts!

The ability to participate on the message boards plus your own private message board.

A personalized central message board to follow your favorite conversations across the network.

A tribute section - a support for the next career move.

Easy search functionality to quickly find people with similar interests or backgrounds.

However I felt there could be a bit more 2.0 in there, it could be a bit, well, cooler. Take a look at the Nike+ site for instance (for creating a runner's profile using the Nike+ iTunes combination). It has very good personal tools (you upload all your runs, it gives you analysis, playlists, so on). But it also has good community tools, for instance you can set a goal such as 'Run 100 miles' and others can join that goal, a la 43Things. Academici.net could do with a bit of this, e.g. 'I'm interested in creating a Framework 7 proposal on web 2.0 technologies'. You can kind of do this in the forums, but I think it could be made more accessible - the forums approach feels a bit old school VLE.