I built a similar site in 2009 focusing on Spanish/English exchange only (http://lenguajero.com). I learned a lot of lessons from the whole experience (like it's really hard to get people to pay for language learning on the web). We have around 13,000 members these days, but we're still small potatoes compared to livemocha.com or busuu.com.
I wish the verbling guys lots of luck with their new venture!
Thanks, August! You all are definitely the other site that gets it when it comes to language exchange. Looking forward to chatting with you as soon as we have a bit of a breather.
It's funny that I came up with exactly the same idea this spring and was almost going to apply for YC funding. But I changed my mind after talking to a couple of my friends (international students who know more than one language), most of them said it's a good idea but they also felt it's not very comfortable for them to talk to strangers face to face (online). Another challenge facing such kind of site is how do you motivate strangers to actually teach each other languages while keeping their attention span long enough, say, 5 minutes. Without a good motivation system verbling will just end up being another video chatting site. I also couldn't find an easy way of generating profit besides selling ads and charging user for talking to professional language teachers. Maybe the site will build a reputation system so the best users can get paid talking to other premium account users, and site will take commission from each transaction. But in order to do that, you need to have a big user base, after all it's a chicken and egg problem.
"not very comfortable for them to talk to strangers face to face (online)" - this may be true of certain people but there are large numbers who will do based on my experience of using a text and voice language exchange site called sharedtalk.com. There are always many people there, particularly seems to be Spanish (especially from Colombia for whatever reason) and Portuguese (almost all from Brazil) speakers wanted to exchange with English speakers. Although the text chat is most popular there, the users are often very willing to exchange Skype names to use voice or video chat.
"how do you motivate strangers to actually teach each other languages while keeping their attention span long enough, say, 5 minutes." - In my experience, you do not actively teach each other the language, more just chat in the different languages and correct and explain the mistakes your partner makes in your native language. Thus, boredom after 5 minutes is not a problem, provided you get along, especially with all the different cultural differences to talk about.
I agree with most of the points you made, however, as ccarpenterg just said, it's a sharedtalk for beautiful people, people who are introverted or not confident about their physical appearances might not be willing to video chat with strangers. In the first case you mentioned, were user willing to exchange skype names before or after they had the text chat? The reason I am asking is because text chat might make a very big difference in building the initial trust between users.
This is an excellent point, I think you are right. On shared talk the number of people in voice chat is always significantly lower than in the text chat although once in text chat people often, after say 5 mins of chatting, ask to move to skype for voice chat. Also, as a learner of Portuguese, I've noticed that the Portuguese/English native speaker ratio is usually much high in voice chat than for text chat which may be to do with the more extroverted nature (in general) of Brazilians compared to people from English speaking countries.
Also you want to make sure the ratio between different language speakers is well balanced. I can see the reason behind a lot a Brazilians and Hispanics wanting to learn English, it's the most important language after all. But are there as many English speakers (mostly Americans) who want to learn Spanish and Portuguese? What are the motivations for them to pick up a second language?
No, from my experience with sharedtalk this is a definite problem for certain language learners (although not necessarily the startup since they don't need to appeal to everybody). Native speakers of English are in demand from native speakers of almost all languages. If you are a native speaker of a language popular with English speakers (such as Spanish or French) and want to learn English you are also in luck. However, on sharedtalk there are often many speakers of certain languages (such as Turkish and Chinese) wanted to learn English whilst the reverse is not true, and if, for example, you are a Turkish speaker wanted to learn Czech then your chances of finding a suitable exchange partner are very slim indeed.
The speakers on sharedtalk also vary with the time of day, so it helps if your timezone is similar to that of the countries which speak the language you wish to learn.
Studied abroad twice in college, and have done a pretty good job of keeping my language ability on life support via weekly face to face language exchanges with native speakers. So I think this idea makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't say they helped me learn anything, but it has helped me to keep from forgetting.
It seems like this kind of system has a couple of markets. I think the reason a lot of Spanish speakers are using it, is because they may already have book learned the basics of English, but lack the day to day interaction. So that's one segment. It seems like this site is a sweet spot for them.
But another segment probably not as well served would be people who are completely new to a language. Most language partners won't have the skill to introduce someone who has no background in it. So I think the uptake for these kinds of language learners would be low.
One thing that would be really awesome is to consider integrating some kind of learning curriculum. But the trick is if you had to supply curriculum for every language, that won't scale well at all. Instead, consider the barefoot language learning school of thought:
Also, for more advance learners who are already able to carry out basic conversations, topic suggestions would be super helpful to keep the chat flowing. You can only talk about your family for so long...
I looked to sign up but none of my languages are supported yet, otherwise looks promising.
Another site, mylanguageexchange.com, has a similar service for connecting native speakers and learners, and it has a large user base. It has crude web-based text chat built in, but many people just use the site to make connections and then talk to each other via an IM service of their choice.
Hey, I'm one of the cofounders. There are definitely a number of preexisting options in the space. We think that having to search profiles and schedule times is unnecessary work that takes up time you could be practicing your language. It's really fun to just jump in and chat, and feedback has been positive from users who have used both us and other language exchange sites.
I agree. I have tried various language exchanges, and picking a partner and scheduling things is an unnecessary distraction and time consuming. I am looking forward to when you offer chinese. You should schedule it for the evenings in the US, which is the morning in china.
One potential problem you will face is that the time spent on each language needs to be balanced. I don't want to spend all my time teaching English, and then have the person hangup on me.
A better alternative is sharedtalk.com, you can also do voice chat there. I use that a lot, but in general the pattern is just to use this type of site as an introduction at which point you exchange Skype or facebook user names and then switch to that for the long term language exchange.
The real competition for this new site in my opinon, is therefore not any of these exchange sites, but Skype since the call quality is so much better than any flash based solution can achieve. They need to offer something special in order to retain long term users and not just be a site used to introduce language learners.
Do you have access to the product? I am very curious. The presentation demo looked intruiging, but also limited to text which doesn't sound like fun. What is the product like? Have you been using it? I was worried that it was vaporware.
Rosetta Stone does something like this already - in addition to learning the language you can engage in peer-to-peer or peer-to-teacher live instruction through the software. It matches you based on language level, etc. The cool part about the peer-to-peer interaction is that it's with someone equally dedicated to learning the language, since they also bought the software and engaged in a bunch of lessons. Of course, Rosetta charges for this service.
What does Verbling offer that Rosetta doesn't - is it easier/faster/cheaper/etc?
I hope they don't riddle their site with crappy ads and upsells like all their competitors. A lot of people spend money on language learning, so if you make a good premium product, they will buy.
"I hope they don't riddle their site with crappy ads and upsells like all their competitors" - I'm not sure about all competitors but I've used both Bussu.com and SharedTalk.com and neither of them have these problems. In fact, the latter has no ads or upsells at all.
Just tried busuu.com again and it's showing me ads for taps and office chairs - just what I'm looking for on a language learning site!
I didn't know about sharedtalk.com. Looks like it's made by Rosetta Stone. The sign up form is like a mortgage application. Why does a language learning site need to know my gender, birthdate and address?
I think gender and birthdate are important information for selecting a suitable partner. For example, I prefer to speak to females around my age, rather than males or females who are much younger or older, as I find it more interesting to chat to them. It doesn't ask for your address, just your country and city (I'm pretty sure city is optional), again information that is often useful when picking an exchange partner (for example, the Spanish spoken in Spain has certain differences to that spoken in Mexico - usage, accent, slang etc).
I didn't realise Bussu showed ads since I use Adblock but I agree that the ad they are showing you would be annoying.
No need to worry on that account. We're dedicated to keeping it the kind of site that we like to use, and crappy ads and in-your-face upsells aren't part of that. :)
The Chatroulette connection is particularly interesting since Verbling could achieve what Chatroullete tried and failed at. Chatroulette's founder, who learned English from online video chats, supposedly got his idea from interactions with foreigners and other cultures in a tourist shop in Russia: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/17/100517fa_fact_...
A feature of this site is the ability to instantly connect with a partner. However, there needs to be a way to switch partners instantly. For example, I was speaking to someone who had video and microphone problems and the only way I could switch was to navigate back to the homepage and start again. I also didn't find the automatic matching, in its current form, an advantage over personal selection. For example, I only wanted to speak with girls around my age. Allowing the user to set criteria for partners (e.g. age, gender, region) would be useful, along with the ability to switch as desired.
The second key feature of this site, compared to alternatives, is the use of video. However, I didn't find any benefits, e.g. in terms of usefulness for language learning or fun, from the use of video over just voice/text communication. Staring at the head of a stranger for the duration of the chat didn't add anything. Need to add some feature or features that make the use of video an advantage and relevant for language learning (this would also encourage people who want to engage in video chat to simply switch to skype once introduced).
I didn't find the suggested topics feature very useful, as it isn't hard to come up with such topics on your own and simply going through suggested topics one by one with partner led to a conversation that felt awkward and jilted. An alternative idea: add some interactive role play puzzles that the users must solve by speaking the foreign language with the user. For example, you could shows a street map with a route shown to one user, and the same map with only the initial position to the other. The latter user must then ask the other user for directions to determine the correct route . Or a restaurant role play where one user is the waiter the other the customer, and the latter is told the dishes they must order, which they must communicate correctly to the waiter. This would lead to more realistic, two-way, conversations, be a lot more fun and be genuinely useful in generating conversation between two strangers.
At the moment, it doesn't offer anything compelling over sharedtalk.com in terms of finding language exchange partners, nor does it offer any of the learning material for which I find Bussu useful. On the plus side, I did find the site easy to sign up for and use, and the call quality was good (call quality on sharedtalk is generally very poor, which is why, even in voice chat there, people almost always suggest moving to skype - hence sharedtalk acts more as an introductions agency).
Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for trying out the site!
We've found, both in talking to language teachers and in our own experience, that video helps communication and comprehension. However, it's definitely the case that for both privacy and bandwidth reasons, sometimes it's a liability. We don't require a webcam so for now you can just disconnect it if you're uncomfortable with it, but we're planning to add an option to intentionally omit the webcam feed in the future.
Thanks for the idea on topics; we've got a lot of ideas in that space, but we wanted to launch as soon as we had a viable product.
Glad you liked the call quality, it's central to many of the features we're hoping to introduce in the future. There's lots more coming. This is just the first step. :)
I wish the verbling guys lots of luck with their new venture!