With Facebook all over the news these days, and VC-backed development teams from Wuxi to Anping scrambling to roll-out Chinese editions of the site, I’m pleased to announce our own little contribution to the social networking frenzy: official ChinesePod and SpanishSense applications for Facebook.
We’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of brave early-adopters and testers from the ChinesePod Facebook group (thank you). Now anyone can install either of our beauties by visiting their respective pages: ChinesePod and SpanishSense. Once the applications are installed, links to them will appear in your left-side navigation bar (tip: click “more” if you can’t see them).
As you can see from this screenshot, the application shows the podcast player along with links to the other lesson materials. You can switch between any of the most recent 10 or so lessons using the select box near the bottom. Changes should be nearly instant.
As icing on the cake, while the application reads the public lesson feed by default, you can customize it to display the podcasts in your private RSS feed. Schedule a month worth of lessons in advance and they’ll appear on Facebook exactly when scheduled. The goal is to make the calendar more useful for those looking for alternatives to iTunes or other RSS readers, or who have difficulty keeping their iPods synched (like me).
As always, we’ll be working to improve these features over time, so please feel free to contact us with thoughts and feedback (and problems). Perhaps we should also be having a conversation about where language learning should happen with social networking platforms like Facebook. What brilliant applications should we be working on?
Is Myspace yesterday’s news now then?
I’ve only just my page working in Chinese.
Okay … I’ve never even glanced at “Facebook” until now. I went ahead and signed up with my University account. A bit confused. Anyone wanna explain the attraction of the site? And why does it keep asking for my email password? Does the fact that my Facebook logon is different than my CPOD/SpS logon mess up anything in that module?
I don’t get it. I must be an old luddite or something. Apparently you can’t even look at facebook without registering and logging in, and I’ve had it up to here with all this rego crap. It’s the web for god sake, we don’t own it or the people who use it, we put stuff up there to share and whoever wants it get it. Simple. And what does facebook do? Isn’t it the same as what can be done on any web site or blog, except that you don’t have to type a href = to link to some other page, oh what a thrill, and nobody can see what you do unless they join some Inner Circle. Huh? How can it be a useless piece of proprietary nonsense and attract millions of people? I don’t know, I just don’t get it, and I’m not prepared to register to get it. What am I not seeing here?
Hi AuntySue and Fudawei,
I think Facebook is popular because…well one’s friends are on it. They are a perpetual chicken that already hatched the egg. I have seen friends morph and move like this Yahoo -> Google -> Friendster -> YahooMsg, MSN Msg -> Facebook -> stuff I don’t know yet…but they do!
I used to ‘chat’ with friends in emails, but that has almost gone as passe as handwritten letters. I still go to the news sites daily though.
I still do not however go to the Chinese news sites regularly though, probably for a variety of reasons, but my idea is this, if Cpod can pull various graded, related content to a main Cpod page…it would be a great help. But just don’t pull ChinaDaily…poop news.
I call it “Chinesepod News You Can Use,” real content to help you learn about China and Chinese on your terms.
If you could run the content thru some sort of Cpod filter, select for word frequency match in relation to Cpod dialogue vocabulary and Cpod study levels, and output it on a daily basis. Include photos and an ability for users to comment and rate the article.
And make the interface simple, clean and pretty…unlike umm…you now typical Chinese jabillion color sites.
One has to have a set of young friends in order to see how effective Facebook is in helping friends keep track of each other. A Facebook user can post his or her status, and immediately this user’s friends will be notified. Well, the notification becomes known once the friends log in to Facebook. In fact, anything a user does on Facebook, like changing profile information, adding pictures to an album, etc. are made known to friends without the user explicitly informing their friends. In addition, Facebook allows groups of people to form groups.
I have a number of friends who are in their twenties and I have learned that it is easier to get a response from them if I post a message on their “wall” than writing them an email.
I’ve only used Facebook for a couple of months. I find it fascinating to observe how the 20-something generation communicate with each other. And personally, one of the bonuses of joining Facebook is I was able to link to Amber as a friend!
One of these days, I’ll have to figure out the Facebook API and write a simple Facebook application.
AuntySue, I think we this type of site containing personal profiles, register to view is a necessdity really, otherwise it’s just window shopping for perverts, paedophiles and serial killers…
hehe I didn’t know there was a Jenny Zhu Appreciation Society.
Ok Facebook looks like good fun.
Bazza, I’m surprised that you’re not the founder of Facebook’s Jenny Zhu Appreciation Society.
Yeah so am I. LOL
Looks like you’re only allowed to be in one regional network, is it ok to pick ‘China’ even if you don’t live there?
Bazza,
I am waiting for you to start the “I Love Jenny Zhu” group in Facebook.
I have admit Facebook is cooler than myspace, I could get very addicted to it. hehe
Found a dvd collection app, so I’ve got to add my entire dvd collection to it now hehe.
It possible to insert the ChinesePod app into your profile?
Hey Bazza,
After the app is installed a link appears on the profile page directing people to the application page, but it disappears after people visit the actual page.
Wanted to avoid the perception of “spamming” people’s facebook space. That’s the same reason we don’t ask (force?) people to invite friends when installing the application. There’s clearly a lot more potential for facebook though. Ideas for things to put on the profile space would be neat — connections with fellow ChinesePod users maybe?
There’s about 55 Jenny Zhu’s on facebook hehe.
I think it would be useful to have a ChinesePod network on facebook.
You can suggest new ones here:
https://register.facebook.com/help.php?tab=suggest
It could be defined as a workplace.
UPDATE: after getting some complaints from users who couldn’t find the ChinesePod app after installing it, we’ve put a copy of the flash player right in the profile. If you’ve already installed the app, this will only appear after you visit our canvas page:
http://apps.facebook.com/chinesepod
http://apps.facebook.com/spanishsense
The player will update with the top lesson in your feed every time you visit our canvas page (the one shown above), which you can also reach by clicking on the “customize” link below the player.
Is this meant to be up and running now? I just get a blank screen, nothing like the screen shot. I’ve also mentioned it on the forum.