Something Meaningful
Very cool, but I bailed on the signup: your Facebook login asks for my email, friends list, and public profile. Why is all of this necessary simply as authentication?
Are you trying to combine dating, learning a language, and collaborating on 'work stuff'? It wasn't very clear to me.
Anyway, when I first moved to a new city, I tried doing the whole 'language tandem' thing, which, by the way, is not a popular phrase in the US. In fact, many people don't understand what that is. People usually call it 'language exchange'. At least in my experience.
Anyway, I used http://conversationexchange.com.
It was frustrating. But it depends what you wanted out of it. I wanted to genuinely learn a language, but had heard a lot of people use it to date.
It didn't work out for me because I was a beginner, and I needed a little more structure. The people who I met just wanted to 'chat', with no real learning material. And many didn't even know what books to recommend.
I think it would've been better if there would've been two people who genuinely wanted to learn a language and were at the same level. But even then, switching back and forth from teacher to student is challenging, especially amongst beginners.
I think it worked out great when both parties had sufficient knowledge to not use a book, and were just learning vocabulary and a small set of new rules.
Please, please, please, please: link to your website from your blog, in the header. Just do it!
Really cool idea - I've already applied!
Two quick suggestions, though. First, In this blog post, every one of your images is a guy and a girl together. kafkaesque and others expressed confusion about whether or not there was a dating overtone. Maybe this is adding to the confusion?
Second, please get some new icons for the male/female indicators in the sign up process. If you need icons instead of text, just use the standard gender symbols with some pink/blue as an added indicator. Maybe I'm dumb, but it took me a long time to realize that the leaf-looking things on the side of the girl's head were pigtails.
I love this idea and have this bookmarked. The only things that make me hesitant to sign up are:
(1) I'm definitely not conversational in any language other than English. (I'm very slowly working on Japanese, but I haven't really built up much vocabulary or much of the grammar. I'm less driven about learning than I probably should be, but I figure I can continue to work on it this slowly until I get to a certain point.) Have you had any stores of people with differing relative skills doing a language exchange?
(2) I live in a not-quite-densely-populated area (Amarillo, Texas), so I can only wonder how vibrant the CoffeeStrap user-base here would be. There's really no solution to this one other than to sign up and try to start something myself. It's what really kills me about living out here and seeing all of these cool services, but I suppose it comes with the territory.
Is there any significant trend of people leaving academia for the tech world? I spent 4 years grinding away on cancer drug development. Between the billions of dollars it takes to commercialize such drugs and the single digit percentage that actually advance from human trials to clinical use, I wondered if the work I was doing was not going to be put to good use.
More importantly, I didn't feel like I was learning every day. Much of the work is absurdly repetitive.
I started learning how to build web applications and found it more mentally rewarding... but what are the ramifications of that for research? It's incredibly important but not seen as very exciting these days.
You need to do some testing in Opera, the page looks pretty funny: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10190786/badfont.png
Edit: In my Firefox it's broken too. Turns out only Chrome renders it legibly.
Side note: What is it about graduate work that burns people out on their field? I've met quite a few people with masters and PhDs who switch fields afterward and basically run away.
Good luck and congrats on following your dreams...I remember when you first mentioned CoffeeStrap on HN and I thought it was some bastard product involving CoffeeScript and Twitter Bootstrap.
Hopefully you find the technical person you need to help execute your idea...it's not just tech expertise you need, but someone who understands and buys into your idea well enough to see how tech can make it uniquely (and practically) executable.
So... it's like a real world verbling?
Good luck!
