Livemocha

» see livemocha.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

language exchange sites were never my surface. by 2007 i was fluent enough in english from years of code documentation and irc logs and forum posts on donanimhaber and frmtr. i did not need a peer-review community to drill grammar with a native speaker. livemocha was for adults learning a second language as a project, that was not the project i was on.

the company started in bellevue washington late 2006 with three founders, raghav kher and shirish nadkarni and krishnan seshadrinathan, all coming out of microsoft and amazon. the public launch landed 24 september 2007. the pitch was a free social network organized around language. you filled in your native language at signup, you filled in the language you wanted to learn, the site routed your written and spoken exercises out to a native speaker of that language for correction. you returned the favor for someone learning your language.

the catalog grew to 38 languages by the mid run. spanish and mandarin and french and german at the top of the menu, esperanto and small ones holding the long tail. peak registered membership ran around 12 million across 196 countries with 400 thousand daily visitors at the 2012 high water mark. that is a real number for a free niche-tier learning site that lived almost entirely on user labor.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

michael schutzler took over as ceo in june 2010 from the founding team and pushed the platform toward a freemium model. core peer-review stayed free, premium content packages and structured courses moved behind a paywall. the company raised series rounds from august capital and maveron and others through 2008-2011, the rounds funded the content build-out and the international marketing.

the community itself was a fairly specific user shape. retirees taking up italian for a trip, university students padding their spanish requirement, american adults learning mandarin for work. corrections were anonymous and asynchronous, exchanges happened over days not minutes, the rhythm of the site was slow and asymmetric in a way that the chat-first language apps that followed would replace.

~ the rosetta stone years ~

rosetta stone acquired livemocha on 2 april 2013 for 8.5 million dollars in cash. the public framing was that rosetta stone needed a social layer to compete with duolingo, which had launched its public beta the same year and was eating the free-language-learning category from the bottom. livemocha gave rosetta stone the peer-review network and the international footprint.

the integration went the way these usually go. the legacy livemocha site went offline 8 january 2014, replaced by a smaller rebuilt community pegged to the rosetta stone main product. the rebuilt community lost most of the asynchronous-exchange flavor of the original and never recovered the daily-visitor numbers. april 22 2016 rosetta stone closed the community for good, citing low engagement against the rebuild.

~ the long tail ~

duolingo went on to become the category leader on the back of the chat-first short-session model that livemocha had not pursued. busuu and hellotalk took over the peer-exchange niche specifically with mobile-first interfaces. the asynchronous web-forum rhythm of livemocha did not survive the move to smartphones. the corrections database, eight years of human-graded second-language writing across 38 languages, went dark with the shutdown and has not been mirrored anywhere public.

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