These days I’m try­ing to cut down my Face­book addic­tion, and let’s be hon­est: every­body has it. Vis­it­ing it only on week-ends, i.e. only on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day, would already be a great achievement.

On my Mac, the geeki­est way to pre­vent access to it is by block­ing the URL inside the /etc/hosts file, adding a line like this one:

127.0.0.1     facebook.com

Unfor­tu­nately, the file doesn’t sup­port wild cards so a new line must be added for every sub­do­main, and Face­book has a lot of them, not to men­tion that the num­ber of line dou­bles because of the encrypted con­nec­tion. So basi­cally the lines to effec­tively block Face­book are at least the following:

127.0.0.1     facebook.com

127.0.0.1     www.facebook.com

127.0.0.1     https://facebook.com

127.0.0.1     https://www.facebook.com

The site still remains acces­si­ble if another sub­do­main is included in the URL, like “m.facebook.com” or “apps.facebook.com”, so one may con­sider to add them as well. I know, maybe there are bet­ter way like using a web fil­ter, but I don’t like them so much.

Once hav­ing blocked Face­book on Mac OS X, I still needed to do the same on my Android phone. It is well known that being based on Linux, Android has the same /etc/hosts file work­ing the exact same way that on a desk­top sys­tem. Appar­ently, it resides on a read-only par­ti­tion and it’s quite a pain to quickly add and remove a site, this time a web fil­ter would do the job. So I spent almost an hour look­ing for a way to block Face­book on Android, but the infor­ma­tions online are really poor.

In the end, I stum­bled across an app called Web­nanny in the mar­ket, and it works pretty well. It’s a full-featured web fil­ter and has an option to block var­i­ous site cat­e­gories like adult mate­r­ial, gam­bling sites, secu­rity threats and even social net­works, so I didn’t even need to man­u­ally black­list face­book, it was included in the set­tings and sure enough, it works for every sub­do­main so I saved a lot of time.

I’ve been an early adopter of Duolingo for a while, and I can say it really can be a game changer in lan­guage learn­ing and really give a boost to the trans­la­tion world online.

Duolingo is yet another project based on crowd­sourc­ing, born from the mind of that genious of Luis Von Ahn. For those who don’t know him, Von Ahn is a pro­fes­sor at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity mainly known for his projects involv­ing, as said, the con­cept of crowd­sourc­ing, of which the most famous is of course the well-known CAPTCHA, those web­forms with dis­torted let­ters or num­bers that we are asked to type down. The reCAPTCHA pro­gram, in par­tic­u­lar, uses this method to help dig­i­tize books and nowa­days it’s so spread that the num­ber of words dig­i­tal­ized is more than 100 mil­lion PER DAY. reCAPTCHA was even­tu­ally acquired by Google.

Back to Duolingo, the basic pur­pose of the site is to help learn­ing a lan­guage while trans­lat­ing con­tent on the web. It’s cur­rently in pri­vate beta and users can request for an invite. Span­ish and Ger­man are the only two lan­guages sup­ported for now, but of course the team is work­ing to add other. The inter­face is very clean and easy to use, and the site makes heavy use of AJAX, for the tech-savvy ones.

A user can fol­low other users and vicev­ersa, and a rank among one’s fol­low­ers is cre­ated for the lan­guage he is work­ing on, using the skill points earned every time an exer­cise is com­pleted. Basi­cally, the activ­i­ties a user can do in a lan­guage are divided into two strands: lessons on var­i­ous sub­jects — food, places, nature, sports, etc. and of course a lot of gram­mar — that come stan­dard with the sys­tem and trans­la­tion of sen­tences taken from arti­cles on the web.

Every com­pleted les­son unlocks the fol­low­ing and step by step users reach the next level, until level 10 and an aver­age of 6000 skill points are col­lected for a sin­gle lan­guage. It’s pos­si­ble to switch to another lan­guage any­time, and of course the skill points will change accord­ingly, while the points for the trans­lated sen­tences are the same regardless.

Duolingo is advanced enough to guess if the user trans­la­tion is good or not, and it can reject it. After a sen­tence is translated, the site will ask to review a trans­la­tion pre­vi­ously made by some­one other, so the same sen­tence might have sev­eral ver­sions made by dif­fer­ent peo­ple and the rat­ings deter­mine the best translation.

So here’s a quick overview of this new web­site, which I hope will soon be open to every­one. The poten­tial impact is huge: as stated by Von Ahn, trans­lat­ing all the arti­cles of the Eng­lish ver­sion of Wikipedia into Span­ish would nor­mally take around $15 mil­lion using pro­fes­sional trans­la­tors, while with 100,000 Duolingo users it would take just 5 weeks or only 80 hours with a mil­lion users. These num­bers are impres­sive and the best thing is that it’s all free, at least for now. This is once again an exam­ple of the power of crowd­sourc­ing, it’s up to us real­ize how pow­er­ful can we be by sim­ply find a smart way to make the most of all the small tasks that we do every­day while using the internet.

A video by TEDx­CMU is avail­able on YouTube, where Luis talks about his work and all the con­cepts behind the CAPTCHA and Duolingo systems.

I really wish to myself that 2012 be my change and trans­for­ma­tion year, in every aspect. It will be the year I (finally) get my degree, the year I hope to leave Italy once and for­ever — Lon­don being my obses­sion since at least a lus­trum — and also the year I hope to bulk up and gain­ing some seri­ous mass, because I’m work­ing hard since sev­eral weeks now.

But over­all, there’s the most impor­tant thing I hope to achieve: com­plete the tran­si­tion from youth to adult­hood. There’s no exact moment when you can say “Well, from now I’m an adult” but there’s a series of dif­fer­ent lit­tle things that can deter­mine this change. That would be with­out doubt my great­est achieve­ment of the new year.

You already know that on Foursquare there are some lim­its. A limit 0f 500 out­stand­ing friend requests that I pre­vi­ously men­tioned, for exam­ple. A limit of 1000 brands that you can fol­low. And of course a limit of 1000 friends, which I hoped to reach fast. Well, here we are. I don’t know whether and when my account will be trans­formed in a follow-like page.

By the way, you know why I won’t accept your friend request from now on.

We’ve lost arguably the world’s best busi­ness­man and innovator.

I can’t wait for your next keynote in Heaven, that’ll be your largest crowd ever.

See you soon, Steve.

