Hello italki members!

We wanted to announce a new feature called italki Knowledge and a new version of the website. 

Here are the highlights:

italki Knowledge (visit it here)

•    Italki Knowledge is like a free online textbook.  You can start learning a language by reading the italki knowledge pages (example: learn Chinese).
•    Italki Knowledge has two parts: Wiki and Contributions
  •       Wiki pages can be edited by anyone (like Wikipedia)
  •       Contribution pages are created and edited by one or more users
•    You can create italki Knowledge pages using text, video, sound, and pictures
  

Italki Knowledge will really depend on the community creating and editing new content.  So we encourage you to upload notes and handouts for languages that you’re studying.  We also hope you’ll edit pages about learning your native language.

Website Improvements
Based on your feedback, we have also implemented many improvements to the website.

•    The personalized homepage and the navigation bar have been streamlined
•    Shared Files: You can now view files on the website (example: Learning French PDF Textbook) without having to download them. 
•    italki is now available in two more languages: Polish and Bahasa Indonesian

We hope you are enjoying the site and finding it useful.  If you have suggestions for the website, please feel free to send to them to us at feedback@italki.com or leave a message on our feedback page.  italki is only as good as its community, and we're hoping that you'll help us make us the best website for learning languages! 

And keep checking our blog for announcements of new features.  We’ve got even bigger ideas coming up soon!

The italki team

It's been a long time since we've posted on our blog.  We wanted to let you know that we've been busy making improvements, and that there is much more coming at italki. 

In terms of improvements, many of you may have noticed changes from interface tweaks, a new inbox, layout shifts, and our initial version of groups.  Our facebook application has also changed a lot.  There is now a language wall, that mirrors our language index.  Please keep on sending us feedback -- your suggestions help us prioritize what to do next.

 

We've also been working on new features and we hope to release these soon.  In the coming days, we will also be explaining more about how to use the site, and how to get the most out of italki. 

No matter what some marketing department says, learning a language isn't easy.  But if you're learning with other students, it can actually be a lot of fun.  Knowing that there's a world of people who you'll soon be able to communicate with, is what makes learning a new language so exciting. 

It is still early days for italki, so we hope you'll keep on telling us what you'd like to see.  We'll do our best to make italki your ideal language learning community and website.


Thanks,

The italki team

One of the reasons that we started the italki blog was to let our users to follow the company's story from the inside.  This is a hard thing to do, because we have a lot of competitors, many of which are (suspiciously) similar.  We're also busy trying to get the next version of the site ready... Nevertheless, we think it's worth trying to be as open as possible.  We hope this will keep us on the right track for building the site that's best for you, our users. 

Unfortunately, in addition to telling you about the good things coming up -- we also have to be honest with our mistakes.  Recently we've run into a bunch of problems.  Our mail server has been acting up for weeks, and this has been causing many problems with the email confirmations.  A few of our Macintosh users noted that our statistics software was registering as spyware.  And to top it off, today our main database server went dead for a few hours.  This necessitated a trip to our data center to fix the server manually.

This did not make us happy internet people today.

But thankfully, this afternoon the site is up and running again.  More importantly, we're back to working on the next version of italki, which We think will be much better.  Expect the new version in about a week...

Once again, sorry about the disruptions, and please be patient while we get the next version ready.  As always, if you see any problems on the site,  please send an email to info at italki.com, or fill in a form on our contact us link.  We'll try our best to respond to you quickly!

Thanks,

The italki.com team

Welcome to the italki.com blog!  We created this blog to stay better in touch with you, our users.  You can always come to this blog to read about new features on the site, and to learn more about the company itself.  We're a young startup with a lot of ideas and energy.  Our goal is to be the best language learning website on the internet, and we'll need your comments and suggestions to make it happen!

Even though italki.com has been live since January 2007, we've only recently become independent.  We think this will give us the flexibility to expand, quickly improve the site and come up with innovative new services.  Come back to the site again soon, because we'll be releasing a new version shortly. 

Once again, thanks for reading and please send us your comments.  We're very open to any ideas that will make the site better for the community!

The italki.com team