Hi Everyone,

Echo and I are going to be traveling this week and are actually heading out very quickly, so while I haven't had time to write something in detail, I wanted to post quickly to let you guys know how appreciated all of these suggestions are.

Some of this stuff we have already thought about, and some of it is new to us as well. Just generally, I can guarantee that we'll be introducing more variety in the popup test. We also have a few features in active development that we'll be releasing once/if we are happy with them. These will make the points more useful and meaningful, and heighten the value of having networks of friends through the site.

I think usability and interface design is an open question as well -- we are wondering if we need two prominent pages to display and manage lessons or if perhaps there is a better way to do this. So this is a good time to have a discussion of what the site should look like and what people find useful and useless. The really key thing is that whatever we do, we want the site onboarding process to work for total beginners to mandarin as well as more advanced speakers.

Anyway, I'll get back to these points in detail in another day or so. Very briefly, some of the things which are being requested we have already looked at and simply aren't ready to launch for various reasons (i.e. speech recognition). With others there are tradeoffs. That said, please feel free to keep brainstorming, and please don't take our lack of posting here as a sign of neglect.

Cheers,

--david