Following As A New Tool is Merging Contacts with Following

Enables Users to Follow Other Users and Their Work

To enable users to be in contacts with other users, and to follow their work. People didn’t always understand the difference between contacts and following. The difference was that contacts was a two-way relationship, so both parties had to confirm the connection. Following is a one-way relationship: you can follow someone’s work without them having to approve that. The idea behind having two connections was that ‘contacts’ were for people you know, whereas ‘following’ is for people whom you don’t know, but whose work you are interested to follow.

Users found it confusing to have these two kinds of connection. They often weren’t sure what the difference was between contacts and following, and even if they were, they weren’t always sure whether they wanted to be contacts with someone, or to follow them, so the experience wasn’t ideal. We decided to to merge ‘contacts’ into ‘following’, so now all connections between users on Academia.edu are ‘following’ ones. Existing contact connections have been converted into following connections, where both users are following each other.

The social networking sites is to help you find people in your research area, profession or any other area of interest, and keep in touch with them via the News Feed. Hopefully this change makes the sites easier to use, and makes it easier for you to keep up with people in your research area.

—–Always Yours as Usual—-Saurabh

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