Conversing on a Global Web

Here at Profy, we have a true multi-national environment. We authors all live in the United States, although scattered about. The development team is located in Novosibirsk, Russia. And Profy's CTO moved from Germany. Until recently, I'd never had a big language issue (as you can tell from her posts, Svetlana speaks and writes excellent English), but I'd be lying if I said it didn't shame me that most of the Profy staff are far more multi-lingual than I am. While I studied three languages in school (Latin, Polish, and Spanish), I'm no longer fluent in any of them, and started looking around to see what was available other than classes at the local community college or a Berlitz course. As it turns out, language learning is a thriving sector of social networking, and there are lots of sites to enable peer-to-peer learning.

The first one I found was Palabea, a community of users who want to learn a new language or work on one that's rusty. When you first sign up. you enter your country of origin, your native language, any additional languages you speak, and the languages you would like to learn. You can then network with other users with the hope that you can find a partner whose language entries are the opposite of yours to foster a learning exchange. The site allows media uploads, so you can post video tutorials (one I found for the Russian alphabet is particularly good). Palabea also allows users to create virtual classrooms and offer services for pay, where users can pay virtual teachers for language lessons, and they also facilitate an offline language exchange for those who prefer to learn face-to-face.

A second option is My Happy Planet, which has some of the same features as Palabea. Like Palabea, My Happy Planet allows you to enter the languages you speak as well as the ones you are intersted in learning, as well as providing an area for uploading videos and creating and using lessons, but the focus here is on matching people, something that's far more helpful. Rather than paging through results of people and receiving a lot of friend requests that don't match up well, My Happy Planet uses a simple search. You select what language you speak and what language you'd like to learn, and are given results that match those selections. In other words, My Happy Planet tries to find your language partner for you.

While both sites offer a Web 2.0 opportunity to learn a language, neither is perfect. I'm not sure what Palabea's business model is, but My Happy Planet's is readily apparent with three blocks of Google AdSense on every page. Palabea offers a "last logged in" date so at least you know if you are trying to friend someone with a stagnant account, but My Happy Planet only shows you if a user is currently online. Both sites are very dependent on Robert Scoble's theory of the friend divide; in order to get much out of either service at all, you have to have a fair number of friends on the sites to really learn much at all. I joined the Polish language virtual classroom the day I joined the site, and months later, there has still been no activity in the room, a victim of people joining the site and classroom but not engaging.

The online learning space is getting very crowded now, but I really think it's one space that's not going to really gain traction until some of the sites go under and far fewer are left behind that will then have the critical mass of users necessary to make them useful. I'm not sure either of these two language-learning sites will make it to that point without improvement.

Palabea profiles:

My Happy Planet: