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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 it's "not being sold" like PeopleSoft was "not being sold", well, then, one would guess that they really are being sold.
libertarianswag.com
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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).
since it comes with no supporting links.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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!
Gimme a couple minuets, and wikipedia won't call it a blog anymore.
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