Slashdot Mirror
LiveJournal Buyout Rumor
Aaron B. Russell writes "Om Malik reports that Six Apart are looking to buy blogging community LiveJournal.com. Rumour? I hope so. I seriously hope so. Neither Six Apart nor Danga Interactive (the company behind LiveJournal) have commented on the situation yet. What impact will this have for the users and volunteers over at LiveJournal? Chris Schmidt, a volunteer at LiveJournal, hypothesizes here(1) and here(2) ." Sources close to LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick say this is just a rumor, and that LJ is not being sold. Update: 01/06 by J : Our sources were way wrong.
If blogs are digital garbage, what does that make Java then?
Mod point free since 2001
If it's "not being sold" like PeopleSoft was "not being sold", well, then, one would guess that they really are being sold.
libertarianswag.com
.. and stuff it with ads.
Maybe the blog menace will go away.
I did my part, now im waiting for yours.
Mood: Gossipy Listening to: Rumours by Keith Sweat You won't believe what I heard today...
slow digital garbage
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
Even if something does happen, there's always other LJ variants out there, such as DeadJournal and GreatestJournal if your privacy is concerned.
And as hypothesis #2 states the removal of some features, the other variants will almost always have them.
Livejournal isn't the only journal site out there.
Why?
MovableType Sucks.
Why does it suck?
1 J Random Luser on dialup one some old sparcstation IPC, and about 20 lines a Perl can bring any server to it's knees with comment spam.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Sadly, I fear this will be the end of the LiveJournal Volunteer support system which I strongly support: I met the love of my life via doing support for LiveJournal, and it will be sad to imagine that others will not have that same oppourtunity [sic].
Dang, there go my chances of ever mating in this life. Damn you, Six Apart!
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
See LJers freak about it here.
OH dea, I hope this doesn't mean the end of random, attention seeking girls showing their boobs off to their LJ friends to get comments! Say it ain't so!
As a LiveJournal user who's about to celebrate my journal's 3rd birthday, and who's young and female enough not to be embarrassed about it, I doubt most LJ users will know or care. It would be stupid to make more than minor changes to the interface, and if they do, I'm sure old interfaces will be selectable options (as is the case now). The fact is that the vast majority of LJ users came on when the site stopped requiring invite codes to join and feel very little connection with the LJ community as a whole--certainly, no obligation to become paid members just to support the site, or volunteer as coders, testers, or what not. I honestly don't think any of these people will notice anything beyond interface changes, except "Hey, my journal's loading faster than usual. Sweet!"
/. nerds wants to be associated with online diaries. Eeeeew.
I think it's telling that the blurbs about LJ don't mention that it's open source. Yeah, it's cool when it's an OS or a browser or a media format, but what movement of
LJ offers some pretty cool (to the type of person who enjoys LiveJournal-type activities) incentives for users who buy subscriptions. I've certainly put more cash money into LJ than I have into, say, /. for example.
The 12 year olds will have nothing better to do with their time. Hummm maybe catch up on some /. ;)
This is my signature.
Okay Anonymous Coward. I'll put them away. The school disabled server side scripts apparently, probably because of a new security bug.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
I recently got rid of my LiveJournal, and feel a bit relieved. FOr some reason, I found myself spending too much time reading about the percieved(not exactly real) lives of other people who have no bearing on my life. I've been slandered twice on LJ, and in one instance my full name was not used, so I couldn't report them for TOS violations.
That's what's great about livejournal. You can say anything you want, it's only one side of the story, and everyone on your friends list will kiss up to you and agree.
Want to have some fun on LJ? Try to disagree with someone on your friends list, and watch the hilarity ensue.
With interconnected friends networks, gossip can spread like wildfire and all sorts of wonderful sour attitudes towards one another can result.
How would you like it if some LJ using friend of yours decided to tell the world about something you did or didn't do to your embarassment?
I for one can't wait until the blogger bubble bursts.
Wait a minute... blogs are considered digital garbage? I take it you haven't visited the following: http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/ This is not only a blog, but it's artistic genius and hilarious as well! Digital garbage? There can be no such thing!
somewhat sarcastic
I mean seriously, LJ has got to be the most hideously unusable website since Sourceforge - are there any usability guidelines it doesn't violate?
While LJ toyed with the idea of placing adverts on the free account journals, the idea was discarded. This is largely one of the reasons that I *love* LiveJournal: they offer enough basic services for the majority of users to enjoy the site with free accounts, and enough bonus features to make it worthwhile for a small percentage of users to upgrade and thus cover LJ's costs.
/., I find many of the advertisements obnoxiously tacky and intrusive, and I have no desire to pay for the service, unfortunately.
While I also love
What are the advantages of paid accounts over free accounts? Not being a user of LJ, I don't know.
And I did try and visit livejournal.com, but apparently it's blacklisted here at work ):
I'll take a guess and guess that LiveJournal is in the top 5 of open source projects. By popular I mean user count.
If you are looking at popularity by name count, it might even rival Linux.
For the sarcasm impaired: this post seems to be a facaetious comment parodying the attitude of the corporate media towards blogs, which is that they're a threat to be bought out and quashed.
Nerds: one way to detect sarcasm is to notice any surprising detail in any statement, like a Slashdotter demanding more ads, and consider whether the statement in a sarcastic tone rather than "straight". Then, compare its effect as sarcasm with its straight effect, and then choose. In fact, you can usually risk responding to a surprising statement as sarcasm with less danger than risking the reverse. Sure, all this sophistication will require practice, but soon you'll have parallelized the processes enough not to miss a beat. And the cynicism that it generates will help you find an apartment outside your parents' basement.
--
make install -not war
I think Apple might have all the rumor sites confused a bit or at least making an omission:
.Mac. Or it could be part of the iWork bundle.
Just as Apple bought Soundjam from Cassidy and Greene to make iTunes, and as they bought Logic to create Garageband and their own pro audio app - I see Apple making a foray into BLOGging and possibly integrating it into
I would imagine they would go after a the biggest - either LiveJournal or Blogger.
I thought I read that the owners of Blogger are big Mac guys.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Slashdot is now reporting on rumors about blogs.
They might as well change the tag line to: "News for supermarket checkout lines, shit that we can neither confirm nor deny."
They should sell.
This whole Intrawebs thing is just a fad. Get out now!
this is a sig.
Most geeks seem to react to hearing "LiveJournal" with something along the lines of "haha, livejournal sucks! it's just a bunch of 12-year-old girls complaining about their parents!" However, the service is quite interesting from a geek perspective: They run a pretty huge web application (700-800 pageviews per second at peak, most of them database-backed), and Brad has written quite a bit about the challenges and solutions they've come up with. They've also written several very interesting open source infrastructure applications like memcached (used by Slashdot) and perlbal. Thus, while the service may not be all that interesting, the tech behind it certainly is (at least to this geek).
I've been thinking of using their services, but for one reason or another, never moved on my idea.
Can some LiveJournal users given their thoughts on it? How is the community? How is the service as a whole?
Thanks.
Many of us are tired about hearing about the latest entry in so-and-so's online diary, and wish they'd just go away.
It seems to be the norm here that people dislike blogs that don't have a "purpose." What exactly is the problem with these? Is anyone here being forced to read blogs about random nonesense? Does it cause some sort of serious problem? If you want to complain about blogs, complain about the ones run by pseudo-intellectuals who feel they should have some sort of say in the world. Most of the livejournal community are just people interested in social networking. Yes, many blogs will just be random bullshit that no one except the poster will ever care about. But, so what? The people flaming blogging in general probably just need somewhere to vent outside of slashdot, a blog maybe?
Remember eGroups?...
If so you're probably unable to bear, as I am, the take-over-resultant Yahoo Groups interface (I pulled everything I had on there off it), and know just how awful this could be...
since it comes with no supporting links.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
All I can say is good riddance. I hope that LiveJournal gets bought, sold, transformed, hacked to death, and turned into something useful. Right now. LiveJournal is nothing more than a forum for immature emotional wankery, coupled with exhibitionist users who think that they should post every mundane detail of their life in order to validate their existence. Think I'm kidding? Just pick any random LiveJournal user, and then click on their friends. Here's one:
"I realize that pork doesn't smell great when slow cooked unless it has stuff all over it. But why does the house reek of...gas or something? It's foul, and I just had to open the porch door with the fear that I'd keel over from some sort of poisoning."
Wow, way to enlighten to us there, kid.
But what's really annoying about all this is that it seems to be, largely, a LiveJournal phenomena. Blogger actually has some intelligent blogs hosted on it. Bloggers who host their own domains, by far, have something more substantial to contribute to the community. So what makes LiveJournal the pile of crap that it is?
Titus Barik
I have a slashdot journal but only /.ers can post to that and the interface isn't nearly as good as a lot of the blogs I've seen, not to mention no images. I post semi-regularly to a half dozen communities but often have things to say otherwise. Ideally of course I would like to not just be talking to myself... so I think I should start a blog.
Any recommendations on where and how to start? I don't know where to begin. What sites are free, reliable, easy to use, good looking with clean interfaces, and offer ways to publicize your blog (random sampling perhaps). Is there any way to move my journal over without doing the old cut-and-paste? There's a real emphasis on science and geeky stuff in my journal. Categorizing of posts would be nice for me.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I've been a 'member' of LiveJournal since 2001. In that time, I've seen many changes to the service, and most of them have been for the better. The server system seems stable (albeit slow sometimes, but outages are rare) and the development team seems extremely closely knit.
I seriously doubt that they will give up the ship so easily, unless they were offered a tremendous sum. There seems to be too much pride in the systems they've coded themselves. It's no small feat to create and maintain a system that houses over a million and a half active accounts. (just check the livejournal.com main page.
[an error occured while processing this directive]
-more customizable layouts
-more user icons
-more picture storage
-phone posting
-email posting
-username@livejournal.com forwarding
-http://username.livejournal.com address
-able to create journals for RSS feeds
-(formerly) able to invite free users
-etc. etc.
-mkb
you can always talk to the guys over at http://www.deadjournal.com/ and see if they want to get bought out.
Bringing your mosaic ideas to life. Mosaiclegs
Look for any LJ community with the name "naked" or a variation thereof in the name.
Unless it's specifically geared towards showing pictures of guys, the photos will be there.
Warning though, the photos, by and large, won't be up for long. The companies hosting the pics generally yank them as being a violation of the terms of service.
And the groups burn out fast, so there's a lot of churn and you have to keep hunting to find them.
Easier just to go to sourceforge and search for any projects with "porn" in the name. There are a lot of easy to use mass download utilities out there.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The next release of Mac OS X Server (10.4) will have the Blojsom blogging system built in although I'm not sure how heavily they'll promote that.
Also, I believe that there's a feature for .Mac called iBlog that lets you blog to your .Mac account, although I've not used it.
So much of the criticism about blogging that I have seen seems to be embodied in LJ. Most of the real blogs I have seen that use WordPress or MovableType seem to be done by people who are at least semi-serious about what they write. Most MT users I have seen, for example, put at least a modicum of thought into what they write and it's rarely about their life unless it affects the direction of the blog or is amusing to the readers.
LJs are appropriate for people who want to help people in their lives who are far away keep up with what's going on in their life and stuff like that. They don't seem to be very useful for much else. Blogs on the other hand tend to be focused on issues like politics, coding, music, etc.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The entire purpose of having a journal online is to share it with others. While I don't post every miniscule thought, reaction, or whine, I do record what recent experiences I found to be either interesting, insightful, or funny - sound familiar??
And I do enjoy reading entries written by my real life friends who also use LiveJournal or some other blog. It's a good way to catch up with many friends within a few minutes without having to wait for a reasonable hour of the day and picking up a phone to find out. The benefits of using a blog service such as livejournal are recording key moments in one's life... and being able to share them with friends - if you... have any.
Don't you think that your characterization of late joining LJers is a egregiously unfair? We're not all assholes.
Photos.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
LiveJournal is the only reliable place to find them.
If it's not a rumour, it probably is a rumor. The other way round is also true.
Even though it is used mostly by whining 12 year olds complaining noone thinks they are cute. The system it's self is very useable and pretty advanced. It's always going to be known as "The whiney blog site", but the simpleness of the place (and yet still powerfully customizable) makes it worth keeping around, if only to see what comes out of it in the future.
I like muppets.
Grazzy, is that you? Only Grazzy is qualified to say for sure whether it's sarcasm. Just because you agree with the statement doesn't mean it's not sarcastic: not all sarcasm is accurate. In this case, though, your problem isn't the blogs, but rather that you keep hearing about them somehow. Since blogs require clicks, I think you should stop clicking them, or get your friends to stop emailing you about them. Annoying people aren't going "away" in our shrinking world: you have to learn to control your own environment better.
--
make install -not war
And access to their faster servers. The site will frequently slow down to a crawl for non-paid users.
I'm not trolling here before I do get flamed, however who gives a monkeys.
What relevance does a blog have to most people. I find them annoying and they tend to have people bitching about their mates etc.
Any sensible person wouldn't post that they had done x on a blog unless they were trying to tell the world.
People who weblog are craving attention from the rest of the world.
Sorry but go get a diary and write in in there.
(In case you hadn't noticed, yes I hate bloggers)
The real difference between slashdot and all the jetsam and blogsam bobing in and out of the attention of the surfing public is the peer refereeing: the moderation. /. eds and Roland Clique-appeal wannabes] who drag stuff in for us to kick around.
This becomes a "blog" worth reading on the strength of its participants/readers [and fails with their weaknesses: sloth, bias, misinformation...just read some of my comments!] more than on the strength of its "writers" [the bizzare zoo of
Nope, quite different from the usual blog and worth the trouble.
And if you think the moderation is spotty and random, get off yer arse and metamoderate!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
c'est pour moi?
No you see I go and talk to my mates to catch up rather than reading their life on a website.
Much better:)
http://www.livejournal.org/download/code/
If 6A screw it up, we just make our own!
He, maybe my LJ client will never get finished now, they'll probably shut down the API.
#include <sig.h>
That's another reason I'm sick of them.
I'm a big fan of LJ. I used to run several mailing lists, some of which were simple "group of friends" lists, but those in particular were hellish to run - after all, in a large enough group to be interesting, there are bound to be people who don't get along.
Everyone has an LJ now, and it's a much more elegant solution. You pick who can read your posts, you pick whose posts you read, and that means you can fit your journal to the dynamics of your own group of friends. It's a fantastic way to keep in touch, to organise events, and to simultaneously keep a (partly private) diary to look back on years later.
don't worry, six apart invented the best blogging script out there and if it accquires LJ, it will give it some much needed trimming. and besides there may be paid versions, but there is always a free version for personal use.
Though "fast servers" are a thing of the past - I think they got rid of paid-user-only servers quite a while ago.
They have something similar with "express lane", though, where the load balancer has two queues, one for paid users and one for free ones, and paid users get priority when site usage is high and requests queue up faster than they can be served.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Does anybody use the journal features of Slashdot? It has many features similar to Livejournal, most notably the friends list, and the view of friends' journals.
Slashdot even goes one better -- you can also define a foes list. If LJ had that, it would be World War III.
hey now! That picture was from one little party that got just a little too carried away. They haven't slept with eachother more than three times since then!
The world according to SComps
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
For those of you who don't know anything about Brad F., Livejournal is really his life. His company, Danga Inc., is mostly dedicated to running Livejournal (although it does develop a lot of neat, free software). I honestly couldn't see him doing anything else. It's not about the money for him, and he loves what he's doing.
I think most Livejournal users would be fairly upset if it was sold.
More likely an old security bug - like "allowing server side scripts lets people run stuff on your server". Especially if you're letting students write the scripts, this can be a problem. The student-access web server here only allows safe-perl scripts (mine allows WebObjects, but few people can upload to it :-))
eWeek seems to think that the rumors are true and the deal will be announced tomorrow. Still no word direct from either Six Apart or "Danga", though.
eWeek confirms sale of LJ to 6A
Dun dun dun... another one bites the dust!
...probably in an even higher percentage. And this has nothing to do with the back end software you're using.
The difference with LiveJournal is simply that it puts all its journals on the same "level," because they've had a much stronger focus on community than any other blogging service and certainly more than independent blogs. I'd suggest that most bloggers who host their own domains don't have anything more substantial to contribute to "the community" than LJ users do; the difference is that 99% of the weblogs out there are never seen by anyone except their owner and the five people they've given the URL to.
Outside of LJ, there really isn't a "community" for blogs: there's a handful of big name ones in various fields (mostly politics and tech), a second tier that shows up from association with the big names, and a whole bunch of never-seens. What LJ critics see as its weakness is also its strength compared to every other service--there's a whole big honking heap of metadata there. You can search for people by physical location, by interests, through friend-of-friend lists. All of the things that FOAF and Trackbacks and Pingbacks and blogrolls try to do, with very limited success, have been done successfully for years over on LiveJournal.
There's some fine writing on LJ, too -- in general, because of the way "friends lists" get interlaced, finding one thoughtful journalist will lead you to a lot of others. Finding an uninteresting journal will, well, usually lead you to more uninteresting ones. Does LiveJournal have a higher percentage of crap than other systems? Possibly, because it has a lower barrier of entry--it can be both no cost and no work, unlike any other system but Blogger. I suspect if you could limit random searches to only paid LJ accounts, the quality would marginally improve; likewise, I suspect if you could actually get a random Blogger-powered journal with a button click, you'd find much the same level of cow dung there as you do on LJ.
Frankly, I hope this rumor doesn't pan out. After trying for a while to move my LJ to MT (and writing a little 'echo' patch that mirrored the MT posts to the old LJ account), I realized that the only value being brought by this approach was the ability for spammers to bomb my Movable Type installation. By flipping things around--using LJ as the main back end, and embedding a custom view of it on my home page--the ones and ones of people who were reading my weblog on my home page still get to do it, with very little visual change, and I keep all the considerable benefits of LJ's community. And no damn comment spam.
Is LJ turning a profit or breaking even? Is 6A? I don't know. I believe LJ is supported mostly by paid users, not by venture capital - it's never positioned itself as an Internet bubble thing.
On the other hand, LJ has really nice comment-spam blocking (partially due to their size; they can detect an address flooding lots of journals with similar crap in ways an individual blog can't), while 6A's been fighting a losing battle against comment-spam on both TypePad and individual MT installations - my LJ has anonymous comments turned on, and I've gotten about three spam comments in its entire life.
As to all the people dismissing LJ as whiny 12-year-old girls... you can find self-absorbed blogging teenagers on Blogger, TypePad, and personal Movable Type/Wordpress/etc installations. LJ has no monopoly. It's just that there's no 'random personally hosted blog' link the way there's a 'random LJ' link, and the 'blogroll' column taking up screen real estate on the front of your blog isn't as easy to peruse as someone's LJ friends list.
Wait and see, I guess. I already had my internet rumor freakout of the month yesterday when I read about Adobe's plans for the next release of Illustrator.
egypt urnash minimal art.
LiveJournal isn't just a bunch of kids spreading rumors. I've met several very cool people via LJ -- some of them in meatspace, and some of them *gasp* FEMALE! Old school LJers (who had to be invited by paid members) have a pretty vibrant social network going on. You just can't get into it because you're obviously a WHINING EMO LOSER!
Here is the FAQ dealing with archiving journals. I really don't think that having a CSV or XML file with the entries around is "not easy". One thing the FAQ seems to hint at is that you don't get the comments attached to the post. Unlike (apparently) a lot of other LJers, my LJ is by me, for me, and everyone else can choose to read it or not (that is to say, comments aren't why I keep a LJ). So in that respect, I'm like you - I don't care about traffic.
Point is: no you aren't screwed if they get bought out, and considering that LJ is Brad Fitz's baby, I think this is all romourware anyway.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
I figured i'd just download the source code and host a free copy for all of my friends.
They also wouldn't have to worry about things such as paid account features.
After LiveJournal defaulted on payment for Christmas wreathes their corporate HQ on Greenbrier Parkway in Beaverton, OR that they purchased through my Scout troop's fundraiser back in the late 1990s, I hope the takeover is quick, and everybody currently with LiveJournal finds themselves without jobs quite quickly. Go takeover!
Help us build a better map!
Contrary to popular belief, LJ was not intended as a blog service, in the sense of personal publishing. It is more of a social-network system with built-in diaries, and its features (friends-only posts, user icons, mood/music fields) indicate that.
The key difference is that a blog is for communicating with people, including strangers, interested in a subject (or sharing a set of interests). A LiveJournal is for communicating with one's friends. Communication with friends, by definition, can involve things which an outsider would consider irrelevant or content-free.
I wrote this script after hearing the rumours.. can also be a good thing if you just want a backup of your livejournal.
LJExport v0.1
Any comments are welcome.. released under the BSD license.
Hello, people, not everyone on LJ is a 12-year old girl complaining about her life.
I have kept an LJ for over a year now, along with a (growing) group of friends. Now that many of us have left for university and co-op work terms abroad, it has become a way to keep up with what's going on with them.
It turns out that some of the people in my residence section also keep LJs, and recently my girlfriend has started one. Over the holidays, when we've been split up, I've kept up with them by reading their LJs. Yes, I do talk to many of them over IM, but reading a post on an LJ beats telling at least a half-dozen people the same story. I find other people's posts to be interesting to read, and I hope other people think the same of mine.
As other people have said, yes, these entries are generally not very insightful writings, and are retellings of the days events. Because many of the people who read my LJ are not geeks, I hide overly geeky talk behind an "LJ cut" (a link to the full text of a hidden part of a post).
Seriously, stop it with the stereotyping of LJ users.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Whoops, silly middle mouse button...
Why would you want a company to buy a free service, with no ad's and no costs unless you want better features.
If this was the case, I would bet money on the fact that it would have considerable changes over a small amount of time, and naturally if a company is willing to buy a free service, they expect to make that money + more off the services. And how do you think they would do that?
TruePunk | Games
From when the first article was posted, people started going insane. He knew this was going to happen. Support requests were opened and ignored. People of course start talking out their ass and rumors start flying, like here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/kyoto_falls/8464. html
Give me a break. Instead of making stupid memes and graphics (ok, my friend and I did to make fun of these people), why not ask Brad? He didn't address the issue until one of the servers was about to crash and even then - he didn't say anything:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_maintenanc e/99736.html?page=1#comments
So yeah, he's playing the hype game quite well. Look at the amount of posts, people backing up to the point servers are crashing, and non-stop posting about it. If these people could organize and riot, they would.
I posted, asking why no one was asking Brad out of all these people posting these cute little memes talking about saving their LJ's and am told Brad couldn't talk. About a press conference? He could confirm that and at least calm some of the masses down. He has 5 million journals and he's playing it up for all it's worth. I post saying this and people get pissed.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/agateway/140707.h tml
And now that I have said this - Brad made it official 4 minutes ago.
The official confirmation here.
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
It's true.
Live Journal Confirms the reports http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/82926.html Six Apart reoprts here: http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2005/01/cu rrent_mood_op.shtml
http://www.sixapart.com/press/livejournal_acquisit ion_faq.shtml
and http://www.sixapart.com/press/weblogging_software_ leader_six_apar.shtml
Thejaswi http://blogs.applibase.net/thejaswi
Read more.
sic