January 05, 2005

• No, I just saw this too, and it is interesting. Wish there was more of the story of why LJ is being sold off.
• I find it interesting, but from the other side (that is, I'm a TypePad user). I hope Six Apart doesn't fool with LJ too much. It has some 5.5 million people because a) it is free, b) it is simple. Most those people aren't interested in a more sophisticated TP account. If I were them, I'd leave the basic LJ service alone. Keep improving it of course, but don't add ads or such. However, stop selling pro LJ accounts after awhile, and migrate those people that have them to TP accounts for the same price. I love my TP account, so I want to see Six Apart succeed. I hope this doesn't turn into some sort of AOL-TW deal.
• Live Journal is a Six Apart-Time-Warner company.
• I HAVE ALIVEJOURNAL DONT DISS IT
• I dig that LJ is open-source and I don't mind paying for the service. The sense of idealism and volunteerism I get from the people that work on it - it's appealing. I also like that it's easy to set up and use, and not bad to look at. No comment spam. No ads. The community aspect is great, both with building/joining communities and the friend-list view so you can read up on all your friends in one place. And despite the stereotype, it doesn't really skew as teenager as many depict. (Unlike, say, Xanga.) I'm not big on the idea of it becoming more "bloglike" so I hope they don't mess with it. At least retaining the current employees gives hope to the idea that it won't change much from the way it was already going.
• Hey hey! Don't be harshing on Xanga. No eprops for you!
• AFAIK, LJ Friendlists currently are the only software social connections done right.
• Uh oh, I'm going to lose the popularity contest again! *snicker*
• On a more serious note: I don't get LJ. I've tried, and I just don't get it. I don't get how it spawns such "community", I don't get why people use it, I think the visuals are horrid, and I don't use my RSS reader enough to see why it's so much better then anything else out there. My personal experience is directly contrary to Melinika on the teenager aspect (although that is by no means a rigerous survey of what LJ's user base really is). The open source part is cool, but I'm not enamored with the product, so I'd probably pay someone to tkae it off my hands. That being said, there must be a very good reason why it has such a strong user base, and I can only hope that SixApart won't fark it up. Becuase there's nothing more tragic then a strong vibrant community being broken apart by a misguided corporation.
• Let me get this straight: if I sign up right now with LJ, I will get a heap of non-teenager monkeys as contacts? Well, here I go, then...
• Well, here I am. Please be my friend, cos I don't know where you lot are.
• I think any easy-to-use service is going to attract teenagers, for sure, more so than having to muck about with blog software and hosting will. So yeah, LJ's got a lot of teens: 15- to 21-year-olds are the majority. I'm just saying in my experience it doesn't skew *as far* to the teenage as people make it sound, that's all. It really depends on where you're looking, what groups you're in, what groups you read. (Not to mention I think older users aren't as likely to provide age information in the stats - I know I don't - so there's probably somewhat more older users out there than the stats say.) Community aspect? In my experience - you're connected to other people more immediately than with a blog, through the friend-list and group journals/communities. I think that's why LJ tends to be more journal-like and blogs tend to be, well, more bloglike (lots of links and more impersonal). Heh. I mean, on LJ everyone has their own space to chatter and their own space to read other people's chatter, and up until recently, you couldn't make a LJ without someone that already had one giving you an invite - so it was all connections and networks from the get-go. Blogs are mostly standalone: making statements on a personal website to an unknown audience.
• I just hope that LJ doesn't go downhill as so many things seem to do when acquired by larger corporations. I may be one of the dinosaurs of LJ (started mine in December of 2000) but that's because I've been quite satisfied with the service. But on the other hand, maybe I should back up all of my content while I'm thinking about it, in case changes are made that make LJ less interesting to me. Then, at least, I don't lose so many years of aimless rambling.
• Good point, Christophine. I've been meaning to back mine up for a while now. I saw on insomnia's LJ (Mefi member insomnia_lj, would you believe) that livejournal used to have banner ads. He's one of the early developers and it would be interesting to get his take on it. His is a worthwhile journal to add, for those who are members.
• Metafilter's thread on the topic: not much to add, although a couple of people think Six Apart are after the user base.
• Er so someone posts what is essentially an unsubstantiated rumour on their site and suddenly everyone is like 'the world is falling!' any non echo chamber confirmation? Oh and like any good social software platform thing it matters not one jot if the entire userbase of livejournal are obnoxious oiks if you and your friends are on it. Because you don't have to see anyone elses posts.
• That does strike me - I resisted LJ for a long time precisely because it smelled to me of excitable teenagers forming clans, but of course that only matters if you are part of a community or friend group full of excitable teenagers. Possibly the levels of access control offered by Livejournal encourage people to be gratuitously personal or eye-gougingly revelatory, but the same crimes are committed on other forms of weblog, and LJ does build in mechanisms at least to keep them hidden from innocent bystanders. Besides, think of the money saved on publishing volumes of goth poetry...
• LJ has a statistics page which provides, among other things, an age breakdown. I use LJ, and there are a lot of teenagers, but the median age for those on my friends-list would be in the mid to upper 20s, I bet. I'd actually prefer LJ not to go the way of MT. My hope is that they don't.
• Far be it from me, a trollish ass, to say this, but I am actually beginning to believe that that wanker ActuallySettle should be forcibly silenced for a while.
• I have both a blog and an LJ, and they serve different functions for me. My LJ I use both for the community, which overlaps with my blog community but isn't identical to it, and for the social software aspects, which I love (the friends page, the comments, the community). My blog serves a different function and reaches a somewhat different group. Some LJ friends read it through the LJ feed, which uses its RSS feed to generate "journal entries"; I know people who do all their blog-reading that way because of the interface. I tend to write about politics and gaming (RPGs, not computer games or gambling) on the blog, and more personal stuff on the LJ. Since I use them for different purposes, and I'm an MT user in my blogging life, trying to move me as a paid user to Typepad would simply lose 6A their revenue stream from me. If this is true, I'm a bit wary of it. After the way 6A handled the MT 3.0 upgrade pricing, it's clear to me they don't have much of a handle on their own user base. I hope that if they acquire LJ, they don't mess with what works.
• Monkeyfilter: think of the money saved on publishing volumes of goth poetry...
• By the way, I have my LJ now, tons of comments and tons of friends, but nothing to write. Can anyone lend me a life?
• I don't think LJ has anything to do with blogging, which is why it mystifies me. There was a blog post linked on Metafilter about the difference between the two that seemed pretty apt to me. It's a network of online communities, IMO. I ran into it when I was very new to the whole Internet Thing and considered it a message-board system in which every member had his or her own "space" in addition to the shared space. That's still how I tend to conceptualize it. Anyway, Skrik, if I had a life I'd lend you one, but I'm running on empty myself. But I'll friend ya. Monkeys unite and all that. (note, this is not just a clever username.)
• Yeah, my link ("clever username") screwed up. Oh well, if you see an unidentified monkey it's me.
• It depends. LJ can be used as a blogging tool, and there are some prominent people doing just that. After all, it offers most of the features of a basic MT install. But with the social stuff, friendlists and whatnot, it can also be what Wurwilf uses it for.
• I don't have a life but that doesn't stop me from posting regularly. In fact, it only makes me post more. I have to admit that I considered switching to Blogger some time ago, but I enjoy the comment feature and the silly little discussions that ensue (just like here) and Blogger's was too much hassle to set up. My friends list there is also predominantly people in their 20s, and consists mostly of Metafilter and MonkeyFilter people at the moment, I think. I reckon Livejournal would be a heck of a good investment. I saw the figures somewhere for paid members and they were something like $2.5 million a year. If they throw more money at more incentives for people to get paid accounts, without getting rid of the free account option, they could easily make more. I wonder if the code will remain open source.
• I really like LJ, and really dislike blogger and the like. For me, it's all about the friends page, and interacting with people, more than the writing. I think it depends how you get in, who are your friends, etc. I got in because a lot of my friends in the Harry Potter fandom were doing it (yes, you can make fun of me now if you want) and I do fannish rambling there sometimes, and I read others' such stuff too. But I'm also friended some from MeFi and MoFi and it's a nice mix of people, some of whom are okay but some of whom have become real friends. Heck, melinika and I had a mini-meetup (like, an hour) as I blew through her town over the holidays, arranged via LJ and really, I wouldn't have been excited to go out of my way for a small meetup with just one user from the site. But we've been reading each other's journals and gotten to know each other and such. It's cool. On topic, I hope things stay the same, or at least mostly. And I'd love to get more Monkey friends, name's the same there as here. I'll add you or friend you back when I get home tonight and am not embarrassed to have LJ open. ;) A good tip is to put "monkeyfilter" in your interests - that's how a few of us found each other. I should check that interest out again tonight as well.
• The majority of the 20 or so mutual friends on my LJ are people I know from college; most of us are in our mid to late 20's. We mostly stay in touch via LJ and instant messaging. People in my circle use it to post interesting links/commentary (making it like a mini-MoFi) and to rant about work and life stuff using locked friends-only posts that are, for the most part, unlikely to ever come back to haunt them or get them fired someday.
• I took a friend's advice and just got a LJ account a couple of days ago -- and now have no idea what to do with it. If you find someone to lend you a life, Skrik, see if they've got another one going spare that I could have. Still, I've got 'monkeyfilter' listed as an interest, so maybe that's a start. Back on topic, this sounds like a very sound investment, and what sbutler and everybody else said - migrating premium users over to TP would make sense, but messing with the basic LJ structure would probably be a bad thing indeed. Never underestimate the power of goth poetry. Think of all the angry emoticons! The horror!
• LJ is perfect for fandom. Compared to message boards, mailing lists and individual blogs, LJ is extremely efficient for fannish interactions. Kerfuffles in particular should always be fought on LJ, where comments are threaded and you can easily address one person without forcing the exchange on everyone else.
• traicle: the code is GPLed so they can't take it away. That's part of the reason the GPL exists. Of course they can stop releasing future improvements or relicence all their internal contributions to whatever they like but they can't stop you taking a snapshot of the codebase on the day before they announce this and developing with it forever,
• From a commercial perspective, LJ's friendlists mean it's as effective a traffic driver, over time, as any of the big indie aggregators (BB, MeFi, etcetera). I like the smell of that analysis that says SA is interested in the user base, as user base == valuation, insanely. SA's TypeKey also serves the same purpose from an acquisitions perspective. I think it would be neat for LJ if it results in additional dev dollars. But given that my own impression of SA's dev allocation is that they're overstretched, I have a hard time imagining how this would add to LJ features.
• You know, I'd totally forgotten about Noam Chomsky's LiveJournal. Maybe I should update it one of these days... Oh, and Skrik, I have flamed you, as requested.
• I hope this does not become a reality. From what I can see, both MovableType and TypePad are radically different services than LJ, and cost more than twice as much. I am one of the 10% of LJ users that actually pays for it, and I would not appreciate radical changes to the service. SixApart really runs the risk of alienating the 10% of LJ's userbase that pays for the service by changing it to a more "blog" like setup. As for the mean age of my friendslist, the youngest members just turned 18, and the oldest members are in their early thirties--I am going to be 24, to give you some idea.
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/82926.html Its not a rumor anymore. SixApart is buying LJ. Official statement is in the above link.
• If ctrl-c, ctrl-v is too much work for you. A link to the above url.
• Also, please don't judge the entire userbase from the teenage miscreants seen in that link. We're not all that stupid. But as with anything, the most vocal group represents the whole to the public, whether they're the majority or not. Also pay for my membership, have paid for others for the heck of it, don't post goth poetry (angst, yes, but no goth poetry), and don't use 1337 except in a strictly facetious manner. Carry on.
• I'm that stupid, I'll have you know. Now I'm thinking about the goth poetry. Gotta go post...
• LJ-er here, and I agree with everyone saying that, if nothing else, it facilitates a strong community. The inability to read my Friends page has led me to undelete my account on a couple of occasions. Reading other people's entries and getting to know them is the best part, I think, and the biggest part of what's missing from other blog formats. Yes, it's a haven for angst, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone, but I don't there's anything wrong with it, at least in small doses. I don't write for an audience, and I rather like the simplicity of LJ, which allows me to sit down and just write whatever comes to mind without any hassle. If people want to read it, fine.