Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0, Web
Facebook brings Latin back to life with new language option
As someone who studied Latin at school, it's nice to see a often-mocked-as-dead language rise from the ashes and brought to life on Facebook - though, I'll admit I won't be leaving the language as my default setting any time soon.

I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Andrew said 12:21PM on 10-04-2009
Latin is a dead language,
dead as it can be.
First it killed the Romans,
now it's killing me.
I also studied Latin, and think this will be a fun way for any Latin scholar to practice.
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kassie2k4 said 8:40PM on 10-04-2009
Thats a lovely Alizee song, Veni Vedi Vici
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sscoppa1 said 8:53PM on 10-04-2009
Eugepae! Lingua Latina vivit!
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turu said 9:25PM on 10-04-2009
Sic quot Americani possono vere utor Latina lingua?
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stephanie said 11:31PM on 10-04-2009
I love that Latin is now on there...in the web 2.0 era, it's so smart to build a platform that allows for user-generated contented. But a fundamental feature of the facebook brand that goes hand-in-hand with this concept is that of keeping control in the hands of the users.
Reports that users' pictures have been used on a jailbait site have been met with apathy by Facebook..., just as when facebook received complaints from users after its last major over-haul, it disregarded its target market's concerns.
This attitude does Not represent a good marketing strategy.
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stephanie said 11:40PM on 10-04-2009
whoops - links..
Facebook users' photos on jailbait site - http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/29/jailbaitgallery-mylife-facebook-technology-internet-pictures.html
Facebook's unresponsiveness to users' complaints - http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2009/03/22/brand-winners-and-losers-obama-and-facebook.aspx
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metro said 6:51AM on 10-05-2009
Facebook might have just done it, but NING beat them to it with an all-Latin social network online over 2 years ago already.
This is http://schola.ning.com and has over 1170 members as of now.
Web 2.0 is proving very good for Latin, and there is an increasing amount of good quality Latin educational material available online for free - for example http://latinum.mypodcast.com , which teaches Latin using audio and the growing collection of Latin children's books on the tar heel reader site http://tarheelreader.org
There are even sites that use audio and avatars such as latinforchildren. blogspot.com
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