Franchu’s lair

Recently I’ve heard from several friends about a new online tool for learning foreign languages and I decided to give it a try.

The website is called Soziety and what I like the most is the fresh concept behind it. The website acts as a hub where people can teach and learn foreign languages. The way of doing it is quite innovative, as you don’t have to go through a bunch of grammar lessons that are utterly boring, instead what they propose is to have online voice conversations thanks to Skype. You just need to download Skype and you are ready to start talking with someone that wants to learn a language you are proficient in, and who is learning a language you know.

Another nice thing they managed to pull out, is that they help you to find a good match for you to start a conversation by comparing your interests with the rests of the candidates, so that you can have common topics to break the ice and get the language lesson going.

In case that you cannot find someone online, or you don’t feel like talking, they have some flashcards for improving your vocabulary, and as it is community based, if you think you can contribute with something, I am sure you will make many people happy

When I decided to write this entry to talk about Soziety and started my research, I accidentally discovered that the creative minds behind it are two students from the same school I attended and that I had been working in Telefonica R&D with the brother of one of those guys! Then I gave it a try, and proposed him an interview for this blog. He kindly accepted to answer some questions that I hope you will find interesting

Past, present and future of Soziety

How would you describe Soziety in 3 sentences?

Soziety is a language-learning social network based on Skype. It is a language exchange meeting point that allows you to practice any language whenever you want and wherever you need. With real people and absolutely for free.

How did you get the idea of starting Soziety?

A lot of people are trying to improve their foreign languages skills with no success.
I was one of them, tired of wasting time and money with teachers and academies in an attempt to learn English.

Since when is Soziety online?

It is online since January 2007, despite we started the development in the summer of 2006

How many people are behind this project?

We are just two guys. We both studied Telecommunications Engineering in the University of Valladolid.

How active is the average Soziety user?

As in other social networks there are different user profiles and very different activity levels. Less than a 20% of the current users are very active, it is not bad in this kind of collaborative networks.
The most part of the users that log into soziety never come back, because people like to see “what is that soziety thing”, but it is not too important as long as they have a Skype identifier to receive incoming calls from other users.

How do you see Soziety evolving during the next year?

There is a lot of work to do. First of all, social networks need to reach a critical mass of users that allows the project to survive and become useful. We hope to evolve the actual linear growth to an exponential trend.
We would like to redesign the whole site (I’m not sure about that) and we have a lot of new language-related services in mind, too.

Recommendations based on your experience for people who want to start an online project

Based on your experience, what would be your advise to someone who wants to start a web project?

My advice could be to do it only if you like what you are doing. Do not worry about the money, work hard and be patient

What has been the most rewarding moment so far?

It is amazing to see that your own project is being used by more and more people from all around the world, to see how soziety helps to make the world smaller.
As a puntual moment, I personally would choose when soziety was one of the 15 nominees at startup 2.0 (http://www.startup2.eu/ ), a competition of European web 2.0 sites. It was a surprise.

Did you finance the project on your own or did you get some initial funding from venture capitalists/banks/etc… ?

On our own. Today it is not expensive in terms of money to run a web project from scratch. Internet allows a “mouth-to-mouth” or viral promotion, we have blogs, forums… so if the project is good, users will help to spread the word.
Anyway we received some calls before the startup 2.0 contest and, if the project keeps growing, we will need some money to improve and maintain the platform and the services we are offering.

How much time do you devote to the project?

Too much Time is a priceless resource and it is never enough.

Random questions

For the nerds among us… what technologies did you use to build Soziety? Why did you choose them?

Soziety is a Java based web application running in a clustered Linux environment. Apache serves the static content, a Tomcat engine is performing the dynamic processing and we use MySQL as database. It is not very complex.
We chose that technologies for two reasons. The first one is that we tried to take advantage of our knowledge from our daily job. The second one is that we are keen on open source, and we don’t like to pay for a worse and closed alternative.

Do you accept contributions for translations of Soziety to other languages? If so, what is the procedure?

Sure ! It is very easy, as we have all the texts in external files. All you have to do is to write to contact@soziety.com showing your interest and we will guide you.

Well, that was it! I want to thank Guido for being so helpful with his answers, and to encourage you to try this system. It is never too late to learn a new language If you want to talk in Spanish, English or French do not hesitate to add me (franchu), and if you feel like helping me out with my Croatian, German, Dutch and Arabic please do Well… for the last 3 only if you are really patient

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