Do’h. Smart.fm Is Closing Down And Going Paid (And Stealing All Your Content, Too)

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Do’h. Smart.fm is closing down, and taking your content with it (holy crap, I made a lot for them, including a good amount of semi-pro audio, which I paid someone for). Well, they’re only kinda-sorta closing down. The parent company, Cerego is ending the Smart.fm service and rebranding it as “iKnow” (wait… hasn’t this happened before… like twice?) and slapping a monthly fee on there.

Pardon The Opinion-Piece / Rant

So, I’m going to write a bit of an opinion-ish editorial-ish rant-ish piece here. Not sure how else to do it. I feel sort of… betrayed?

It’s not because Smart.fm shouldn’t be a paid service… it probably should be. They should have done this a long time ago. My feeling of betrayal is a long term thing, that started over a year ago. Here’s my own personal timeline with Smart.fm… or should I say, iKnow? Hmm, iDon’tKnow…

I discovered iKnow.co.jp (Smart.fm was originally known as iKnow, which is what they’re turning back into now). It was awesome. Probably one of the coolest knives in the knife drawer, so to speak. I loved the heck out of them. They were great.

I kept liking them, but then they switched to Smart.fm. They were still good though.

Then, they got a new UI designer (or something, I don’t know what happened), and everything became hard to use. Things started breaking/sucking, and nothing worked as well as it used to. For learners and people creating content, things just weren’t as easy as they used to be. Someone ruined it, and I don’t know the details. I just know Smart.fm slowly got harder and harder to use (actually it got even worse than this, but keep reading).

I met with one of the co-founders in San Francisco, when he was visiting / talking with people (possibly for investments?). I won’t tell you which one, because I like the guy. We talked about all kinds of things, but one thing that sticks out was his promise that Smart.fm would always be free. Ads? Definite probability… White labeling? Perhaps… but never a pay-to-use kind of program. Whoops. I guess that wasn’t actually his decision to make. We even met regarding a deal that would give him a lot of free content. Good thing it fell through, otherwise that particular content would have been their free content they could now charge for.

Things kept getting worse with the UI. It got harder to create content. It used to take almost no time to create cards… now it takes forever. Things not only loaded slow, but they added a ton of unnecessary steps in order for me to get something set up, making it hard to get things done. Other people started noticing this. For some reason, I had faith that it would get better, yet it only kept getting worse.

I start hearing from various (secret… ahem) contacts about problems from within Smart.fm – the engineers don’t respect the management. The management don’t really understand how to work with engineers. The engineers just kind of do what they want, there is no direction, and nothing gets done. In the meantime, however, Smart.fm raises a ton of money (because their executives, while not good at managing engineers, do happen to be good at raising a lot of money). I hear more and more about how working at Smart.fm isn’t all that great… and when your engineers aren’t happy and they don’t respect you, that’s never a good sign…

Then, things started breaking. My content (which was awesome, and now is kind of broken) started getting mixed up weirdly. Audio would shift around seemingly at random, pairing the wrong audio with the wrong word (audio that either I recorded or paid someone to record for me). My example sentences were getting switched out with other, somewhat correct but mostly incorrect, sentences. Basically, some algorithm on the back end was making me look like an idiot. I would try to fix things as fast as possible, but new problems appeared as fast as I could fix the old ones. This really sucked. This is when I realized it was time to come up with an alternative for TextFugu, which used Smart.fm a lot (all lists I created).

Then, bam, this news hit. Smart.fm is closing down and is becoming iKnow (again). I’m not upset about this because they decided to go to a paid model. Sure, I was promised this would never happen, but I definitely saw this happening at some point. I’m irritated because of the slow, painful process that took place to get to this point. The lowering of quality… the breakage… the lack of support for all the breakage… it goes on and on.

Sure, I’ll have to switch all my TextFugu flashcard content over to something else (some of it already is, thankfully), but I’m hoping that will be a blessing in disguise. I’ll have more control over my own flashcard content, and that will be nice. Still, I’ve had faith in Smart.fm for way too long, even when others had long given up on them. This, however, is my breaking point.

So, I guess it’s time to put down the Smart.fm torch (it doesn’t exist anymore, anyways) and pick up something else. Anki’s good, you should try that.

So, what do you think about all this mumbo-jumbo of Smart.fm changing to iKnow (again) and switching to a pay model? For me, I think it’s smart they’re going paid. They should have done that from the start. But… for me, Smart.fm’s quality has just gone down way too far, and I’ve stuck with them for way too long. It’s time for me to let go and turn to something else. What about you?

/EndRant

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  • http://www.bradleyfarless.com/ Brad F.

    Well, it was kind of hard to use, and I did hear people complaining about it. It’s a great tool, though, and I was surprised it was free to use. That being said, if it’s going to be a pay to play kinda thing, I really hope they fix the problems and make it a much more user friendly experience. I also think it’s kinda crap that they’re going to try to capitalize on other people’s content, like the stuff you put together for free, that they’ll make money off of. You should at least see a cut of the profit from that.

    My prediction is that Smart.fm / iKnow will decline seriously in popularity and something else will just take its place.

  • http://www.bradleyfarless.com/ Brad F.

    By the way, this is a weird implementation of Disqus. I don’t like how it tries to squeeze in my bio at the top and cuts it off.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/euphoriafish Teresa D. Lee

    I wonder why comments are disabled in the Japanese version of the Smart.fm blog.

  • http://twitter.com/PsychoKat21 Kat

    This is very upsetting, mainly because of all the hours that everyone has put into it. Not only people like Koichi who have spent untold hours of labor and apparently his own personal money to create something to use on the site, but also those of us who have been using it to study. It’s a little irritating that the things I have already studied will no longer be tracked, creating extra work for me to sort through and figure out exactly what I need to study and what I feel solid on. Lazy, I know, but it’s also a time management thing.

    I just don’t see how they can justify charging for user generated content. Legally, yes, if you submit it, then they own it. But in a free market? I doubt people will pay for something they, themselves, created. I’m hoping someone with the computer know-how will take up the mantle and create something just as good, and probably better.

  • http://twitter.com/Bonjour_Maiden ALLIE

    disappointing..

  • Alvin B.

    Have an eye out for good alternatives myself, as well. I liked the ease of studying and goals on smart.fm. I never had a sense of progress using Anki, and there was little to no community associated with it either. Smart.fm brought both of those to the table, and was for me the ideal “social learning network”. Just like facebook is free, wikipedia is free, I believe learning can find a free model. I thought that was smart.fm, but I guess I was wrong.

  • http://www.ianlewis.org/ Ian Lewis

    I agree it should have had some sort of paid model from the beginning or at least early on. They should have switched to the paid model when they were at a popularity peak rather than a low which is what it seems like now. iKnow was very nice and though smart.fm’s design images and characters were better, it was much harder to use than iKnow.

    The iPhone app was also never usable. It crashes all the time.

    I’ve used anki for years and knew the author before he wrote it. It’s an amazing piece of software and the author, Damien, spends TONs of personal time supporting it. The iPhone app is also high quality and works very well. Even for large decks it’s very fast and Damien tunes it often. Highly recommended.

  • Anon

    English comments are disabled too. I’m quite bitter about this whole thing actually.

  • mats

    Koichi, why do you think they should charge money? it seems that a lot of the lists were created by users – yourself included – and they’ve done a great job. voluntarily

    I think that knowledge should always be free. if they want money (which they don’t seem to lack judging by your comment on fundraising in your post) they could’ve gone down the donation route like wikipedia

  • Pedro R.

    12$/month for user created content? Really? They must be joking!

  • Enlasnubes

    I loved that website, I get very upset when I read that the are no longer be free. They have the right to be paid, ok, but they should have done that at the beginning!!
    As far as I am concerned, I have begun to use this website, similar to smart.fm:
    http://www.renshuu.org/

  • conz

    You could try Quizlet, the games on there are fun.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jeff-Mills/592030311 Jeff Mills

    I am a little shocked. Smart.FM offered what I really missed with Anki. A bigger (social) community, higher quality learning content and actually a good user-interface and many facts were linked between multiple goals. When I started a new goal, I would usually be already at 50% and didn’t have to restart reviewing stuff I already knew. I was able to track my progress based on projections of the next review date.

    Now after about a month of building a profile where I’ve reviewed all the easy stuff and can focus on the stuff I didn’t know yet (while still reviewing the easy stuff from time to time) ….. suddenly that profile is locked and I have to start all over again. It feels like I’ll have to teach a new SRS system all over again which of the thousands of facts I already know and which fact I don’t know.

  • Ayu

    This destroys my whole learning-process right now… -__-
    I know I’ll get used to Anki as well, but this comes very surprising…

  • WC

    I kept hoping they would monetize and ensure their survival… But it seems like they just did the opposite with that. I’m certainly not willing to pay for their service when there are competing services that are mostly equivalent, and even better in some ways. People already mentioned Anki and Renshuu.org, and I’ve been using ReadTheKanji.com for quite some time. (ReadTK is a pay site now, though.) I’ve even been considering writing my own community-driven site that does things in a more optimal fashion, according to the issues I’ve had with my studies.

    The one thing iKnow brought to the table was their awesome Core series. The order within each set could have been a bit better, but overall it was amazing. It’s sad to see that go behind a paywall.

  • http://twitter.com/Musouka Musouka

    Beside charging a steep 1,000 yen a month, the new iKnow seems to lack the social aspects of the older sites. All my blog entries are gone and there is no profile page :(

  • Anon

    Wow, I thought I was the only guy ever who hated how Smart.fm went from awesome to what-the-hell-are-the-designers-doing. A shame it had to end this way.

  • http://www.facebook.com/chef0 Antony Crisp

    I don’t think it deletes your content. I can still find all of my created lists http://i.imgur.com/nJv4u.png I was also offered 1 year of free service, not sure if that’s for everyone or just long term users. Maybe now that Smart.fm (iKnow) is a paid service, the original iPhone app will return, which i seriously miss… Personally I’m going to give them a chance :)

  • Jonadab the Unsightly One

    Meh.

    I gave up on iKnow shortly after they renamed it to Smart.fm, although truth be told I was already pretty disillusioned with it before the rename. Two major problems with it, from my perspective, were that it gave you too many new cards all at once and didn’t review them frequently enough, and, worse, that their standard decks seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to ordering or prerequisites. For example, it would give you words made out of multiple Kanji you hadn’t learned yet. This was particularly bad in combination with the aforementioned problem: here are ten or twenty new words containing a total of something like thirty different Kanji, none of which you’ve ever seen before in your life. Look over them and learn them all right now, all at once, and then we’ll quiz you on them all, and when you finally get each one right three times by sheer guessing, we won’t show it again until the next day. Completely insane.

    I played around with it off and on for a while, but I was never happy with how it worked. As best I could figure, you needed a near-photographic memory to get any significant benefit from it.

    So I went and wrote my own spaced repetition system and designed it to introduce new cards periodically, one at a time, as the intervals between the existing cards get longer, so that typically your newest card is coming up very frequently — every 2-3 cards at first. This works a lot better for me. Maybe I’m just a dullard.

  • http://www.facebook.com/chef0 Antony Crisp

    Hold on, does iKnow still allow to create your own lists? Much of the reason I used smart.fm was so that I could replicate and learn lists of words I already had to study at uni.. I notice under “my courses” there is a custom tab, but that doesn’t seem to be usable yet :(

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Iliyan-Trifonov/1001011667 Iliyan Trifonov

    Man, this is bad. And I wanted to test my new programming skills writing a symbian/nokia program for the smart.fm api so me and everyone else with these phones could learn while travelling.. I also hope someone will take their place and provide an api too :)

  • Anonymous

    shit!, just Shit

  • gorghurt

    Damn, does anyone know an alternative with dictation.
    Well, i think i should copy all those core vocab into anki, as long as its posible.
    All those sentences, they are imho better than only words.

  • badjuju

    I am angry, to say the least. As s.fm was free, I used it as vocabulary tool for my students.
    I spend countless hours entering every vocab word for all of my courses (thousands of entries)–Cerego is going to charge people to use the content I created?

    Does anyone know of a comparable service?

  • http://www.phrasemix.com/ Aaron @ PhraseMix

    That’s too bad. It was a decent tool to point students to. I spent quite a few hours adding my content to the system. (Partly because the system for adding content was so time-consuming and buggy.)

    Anki is the clear next-best choice, but it’s more of a tool for nerds like me who want to control tons of settings and add our own specially-tweaked content. It’s not something I feel like I can point a general language-learning audience to.

    I wonder if there’s room now for a company to replicate and improve on what Smart.fm did. Surely there must be some way to monetize a ton of fanatical users coming to your website every day and spending upwards of 15 minutes on it.

  • http://twitter.com/rensinjapan Rens Jaspers

    I think I’m going to be on of the very few people that’ll pay the 1000 yen a month. I’m a poor student and I think it’s very expensive, but don’t want to loose my study statistics and make new study schemes myself. I’ve become depended on the site.

    I think that if they drop the fee to 200 yen a month, they’ll probably keep ten times more users and double their revenue.

  • alchymyst

    Yeah, my problem is not really that they decided to charge some money. That’s okay, I expected that at some point. What is really quite low is that they simply imported all the user-created goals into iknow.jp, without listing who the creators are (!), and think that they are going to be charging money for those. Right now everybody I know on smart.fm is importing/deleting lists they made, because people obviously don’t want Cerego to make money off user-created content.

    I think the way they set up pricing is not really smart (ha ha). It’s okay to charge for content they themselves created, but it would have been nice to have a free subscription option that allowed you to use user-created goals, maybe have fewer quiz options, whatever. It seems that having more than one price plan would have been a better business strategy. Right now nobody on my smart.fm friends’ list is planning on using iknow.jp at all… That doesn’t bode well for Cerego.

  • Jim

    You mean using ads? I sort of wished that they have separate pricing options like free users get to get study a few select courses while having banners ads showing. Members (like around 5 dollars per month) who paid get to have access to all the user created goals with little ads but they can’t create goals. Premium users (their current asking price) get access to unlimited content with no banner ads and they get to create their own goals.

  • http://www.phrasemix.com/ Aaron @ PhraseMix

    I could actually see a business model where it’s free to study cards that
    have been made, but you pay to customize or add cards.

  • eDRoaCH

    Reminds me of the CDDB debacle in the late 90s. I added a few hundred CDs to their DB and then they decided to go pay. They failed and basically got replaced.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    yeah, I would have liked to see a freemium model as well. Maybe something that would let you study a certain amount of cards before having to pay. The all or nothing model won’t really let people try things out, and will ultimately hurt business a lot. I’m sure they’ll get their initial sign ups from existing users, but once the trial period they have going ends, it’s going to be hard to convince someone to pay for something they can’t really try.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    I’m going to start recommending Anki – a little more complicated to use (more options, which is good, but also more complicated, so in a way bad… but kind of good?) but pretty solid, I think. Plus, the creator is nice.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    I’m gonna miss dictation too :(

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    dittttto

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    I have no idea – would be interesting to know. When I talked to them before, they said they were mostly focused on their own lists (the ones they made) and really didn’t care too much about user generated lists. So… I imagine they will let you create new lists, but I don’t think it’s as much of a priority for them

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    Nah, I think you’re doing it the right way. Smart.fm just started making less and less sense after becoming Smart.fm. Your own SRS is probably 100x simpler and 10x better.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    I think it should keep your content (like you said). In fact, I kind of wish they were going to delete the content… that way they couldn’t take all the content I created for them and use it behind their paywall :(

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    damn, that sucks :(

    A little warning to pull things off the site would have been nice, for that purpose :(

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    yup, agreed :(

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    yeah, I agree :( Though, their founders are REALLY good at raising lots of unnecessary money, not that that could have lasted another 10+ years.

    I would have liked to see a freemium model for them, if they were going to go paid like this, rather than a black or white get it or don’t model. I’m thinking this will backfire, though their main userbase by far is Japanese people learning English, so perhaps it will do pretty well over there…?

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    damn, man, that’s super lame :(

  • gorghurt

    Yeah, making money with user created content, without asking or even dhow the creator is realy bad. I’m sure this will have juristic consequences.

    By the way, Anki is even usable for dictation, and you can download the core 2000 and 6000 decks easyly.
    I’m fighting with taging and editing the premade decks right now to make a dictation part.
    But tagging isn’t as easy as I thought, I can only tagg all sentences the same, but not only the marked (in ths case all the listening cards).
    But its easy to add the writing part to those cards.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    Well, I guess I think they should have gone paid from the beginning. So, in a sense I think they should be a paid program (actually, freemium seems like a better model), but they should have done it a while ago and not wait until they had a ton of user generated content to (legally) steal and use for their own monetary gain, leaving the creators in the dark.

    I suppose what I’m getting at is that they should have had a monetization plan from the get-go, rather than waiting so long that they had to make a poor decision such as this one, pissing off creators and users alike.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    Just had my first interaction with Damien, nice guy! I definitely feel better about Anki now, though.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    aye

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    too much 2chan maybe? haha.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    ah yeah, it’s their new comments theme. Just trying it out for a while to see if it increases comments or not / seeing if anyone notices. You noticed!

  • Charlie

    I agree that they should have been charging something in the beginning…However, the way that the new CEO went about it was really shaddy. I believe that it was initially meant to be a free service.

    What really is disconcerting is the fact that people put a lot of their time into helping create content not just for themselves but to help others as well. They had an inclination but did not know that Cerego was going to just throw the $12 charge without well warranted notice. I believe that the management team lacked tact. Although not a joint partnership type, there is social responsibility that the company owed/s its users.

    One person stated that they were already provided with a 1year free membership on the new system(Iknow). If management really stands for what they say they should provide to all current users. I think that will at least help to circumvent the feeling of betrayal.

    At this point, it feels more like a bad relationship where “Ok, you have 2months to pack your sh*t and leave”

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    I’m thinking you’re right – something, at least for the Western market (they’re super popular in Japan for learning English) will come in and do a much better job. Smart.fm is so bloated right now, and nobody there really seems to care about what they’re trying to do anymore (that feeling, to me, was lost when they switched to Smart.fm). That being said, I hope they get better too, but I’m not counting on it. They’ve always had a ton of money via funding, so I’m not sure if having a paid model will fix things and make them better. We’ll find out, I’m sure, though!

    Once someone comes in who really cares about SRS and learning appears they will replace them quickly, I think. Anki is a great alternative, I think, though the web-based nature of Smart.fm really makes things simpler for people, I think.

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