Slashdot Mirror
LiveJournal Buyout Confirmed
Kingfox writes "Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal, finally confirms the story that was posted to Slashdot yesterday. Six Apart has purchased Danga. This means that they're moving to San Francisco, LiveJournal users are finally getting the trackback feature, but the project will stay open source, and little else will change for the end user."
They aren't going to raise their prices OR make any other significant changes other than "look and feel" i.e. make it prettier. I wonder how long the "No price changes" will last, I'm willing to bet not long.
Sure, just like they weren't being bought...
People are already reporting ads on LJ, even for paid users: http://www.livejournal.com/users/girlvinyl/178809. html
TrackBack is a damned handy system, which lets you see which other blogs have linked to a particular post that you've made. It's seen in many of the more "professional" blogs, and it's a great tool for finding out about commentary on your posts. I was actually thinking of ditching LiveJournal for a service which supported TrackBack, but I guess I'll now be able to stick around.
Man, WTF?
.. dangit.
im not a 12yo girl, and I use LJ.. and I will probably quit now that they got sold
I wonder whether this will affect the webmaster/abuse contacts' attitudes.
Speaking as someone who's had inappropriate personal information and untrue claims splattered all over the board by a malicious ex, who knew many mutual friends would see it, I was less than impressed by the LiveJournal team's response when I pointed out that defamatory/illegal content was being posted. The ex in question made that post private when I sent her a rather pointed message about it, and the LiveJournal admins then claimed that they "couldn't see private messages" and therefore couldn't investigate my claim, despite the fact that those mutual friends still had no trouble reading every false allegation.
This sort of thing seems to be a serious problem with cheap/freebie blog-hosting services: they're particularly vulnerable to malicious content. In particular, while they have all the usual problems with regulating content as any other part of the Internet, they usually lack adequate resources and/or the willingness to deal with abuse. I'm all for freedom of speech as a general principle, but all the usual legal safeguards seem to be summarily ignored here because they're just too hard to enforce with the current mechanisms, and people's lives can become very unpleasant as a result.
Google ranks pages based on their links. Giving thousands of LJ users trackback will alter Google results forever (unless they start filtering those out)
So, I guess when "sources close to Brad Fitzpatrick" said that LiveJournal was not being sold... well, not so much eh?
Here's an interesting blog post by Mena, President of Six Apart. I thought the following quote was interesting in the context of the typical "bloggerz sux0r" threads you see on slashdot:
I believe that LiveJournal has, unfortunately, received a bum rap because many have considered the postings on LiveJournal to be trivial. It's sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say (and I'm generalizing). The fact is, webloggers and LiveJournalers are in essence doing the same thing: they are posting their thoughts to people who are important to them. For some webloggers, it's 100,000 people, for others it is 10. For LiveJournalers, it may be 30 people, it may be 3 (or a combination of some number).
So long as the amateur porn stays in place, and I can continue to co-admin my porn community, then all is well. (You need to get an account to read the community, and list a valid 18+ birthdate, and submit a join-request. This is so the community doesn't get deleted. It's a CYA maneuver by the livejournal administration to ensure that everybody who watches porn can lie about their age.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm sure most LiveJournal users are concerned with the database API that stores their LOL OMG:Happymood: journal entries.
I'm a paid member, so I dont see them... but I've seen members in my communities start complaining abuot banner ads on their journals now. Is this the first sign of change already?
I don't know whether to feel happy or sad about this merger... I have the distinct feeling that support will divide by 0, prices for paid accounts with do the opposite and server uptimes will become $n-x in $n days, where x is a random integer.
*sighs*
Trackbacking is awesome, but will SixApart take their Typekey service to Livejournal?
That could make for some controversy...
http://www.typekey.com/
Well, atleast now we've proven that Slashdot is more reliable than blogs of 13 year old girls ;)
We atleast bother backing up our rumours with evidence (sometimes!).
Take that, Jenny. Ahaan!
how comes every "Obligatory" post is lame?
yours stands our tho
its like asking a warez group "I've got a 56k dialup for 2 hours a day, can I join?"
Well isn't that special. Take your porn spam elsewhere, thanks.
Wonder if they'll open up some of the features the old company was charging for, like phone posts and more user icons?
Ooh. On second thought, I wonder if they'll even have those at all... did they buy the servers that hosted LJ (and the code for the VoIP stuff), or just all the content?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I might have complaints about other portions of the internet, but I have a simple solution: don't read them. You have absolutely no obligation to read a blog, be it LiveJournal or Blogger or anything else. Exercise your right to choice and ignore them.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
...that Grendel Drargo really knows his pornography
SA is buying Livejournal fromDanga, they are not buying Danga itself.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
I'm not completely sure I get this. I read both Brad and Mena's posts on the journal. They've talked quite a bit about preserving the Live Journal community and making it better. What I don't understand is how this helps 6 Apart make more money, which ought to be the whole idea behind the merger from the business side. I can appreciate Brad doesn't enjoy the business side of running a business, so I can see what he personally gets out of it. Can anyone familiar with this aspect of 6 Apart comment?
It seems to me at some point they will need to think about how to get their users to cough up more dough, or how to mine their user base for dough (selling lists/personal info).
"Why is Six Apart buying LiveJournal?
Lots of reasons:
Together we form super robot that's stronger than the sum of its parts.
Super robots can fight super companies."
Blogger.com bought up by Google...
To think that millions of £££ venture capital will be spent over which system publishes what 14 year old Lisa's dog ate last night.
If you look at her replies to Brad's post, you'll see she's trying to drum up hype for her friends alternative blog site.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I notice you're a subscriber to slashdot. Do you have these same arguments about slashdot (bought by corporation, lots of adverts, etc). This is just like when /. was bought by OSDN, and just like slashdot, LJ is and will remain open source. Why are the two any different....
I call hypocrite...
--Anubis
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
One, I keep a tightly-knit friends-list, and sadly enough, those people would not read my journal regularly if it were not on Livejournal. On LJ, it's just a matter of opening up the "friends page" and seeing all of your friends' entries at once. Handy and keeps you and your buddies close, even if you rarely have the chance to really chat or talk.
Two, I adore the communities. When I need information on some subject, there's always a community. Not only that, but it's usually active. I prefer having a human helping hand rather than that of a search engine; both at once are even better (ha.) For example, I trust the ladies at the VaginaPagina community to relate experiences and help--especially since everyone is there to do just that.
I used to scoff at LJ, but now that I'm there, I just can't leave.
woops, meant /. bought by OSTG
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
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.
LJ has 5.6 million user accounts. 2.4 million of which are active. Far more than slashdot. However, as Brad points out, its an "inward facing" community. I'd never heard of the site until a few months ago. They sure could use better marketing. And better integration with the broader blogging world (with TrackBack). TFA repeatedly states that SixApart aren't out to destroy LJ, but they can do that even without intending to. Let's wait and see.
The content management system is doing that.
Just today I was posting an article discussing Renaissance architecture and what came out was a shoegazer post about cat shit.
I think it must have something to do with the version of PERL I'm using.
-- My Weblog.
Okay, being a five-year user of LJ (user number 1112, suckers) and perm-account holder, I've got a considerable stake in all this. It makes me nervous. I'm not familiar enough with Six Apart and their treatment of MT to be confident in their ability to maintain the status quo around LJ-land. I'm afraid that the business will do what all businesses do, and eventually change from being "for the people" to being "for the profit."
There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who have put time and effort into their own little portion of the Internet, and I'm afraid that with one motion Brad's damaged their stock. The thing is - this is something Brad's been putting his life into for around six years now. If anything he's got the most to lose. (Ignoring the nice chunck of change he jsut pocketed.) Hopefully he walked into this with due diligence and maintains some official control over where LJ will head.
I suppose that's the one question I haven't seen answered - from what Brad said, it seems like he's now just an employee. Any official power he now has is ceremonial. So I hope he made the right choice.
± 29 dB
I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.
Y'know, you don't *have* to read them.
Do you see what I did there?
You mean this? http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/82926.html?t hread=17471214#t17471214
It's brilliant! If SA screws LJ users over, that would create a horde of people who would want to bitch and moan and whine and write bad poetry on their LiveJournals. But then since SA controls LJ, they would either have to rant somewhere else (God forbid!) or pay to get a new LJ account so they can rant about how they had got screwed over but ended up going back to SA anyway. And you know what? I bet a large amount of people would do exactly that if SA decides to screw LJ over. Some people are that stupid. LiveJournal is a very emotional place. And as we all know, no matter how many times emotionally abusive "signifigant others" hurt some people, they still end up crawling back just to get screwed over again. Six Apart could just take this principle and apply it to making money. Hell, a bunch of assholes already do their with their girlfriends.
read the bunni comic
Damn that made me laugh.
Do you see what I did there?
little else will change for the end user.
Oh, except for that whole loss-of-rights-to-one's-soul thing, right?
...as this doesn't inhibit my freedom to rant on for two days about how frappy my cappuccino is, I'm fine.
Gawd, I'm so lonely...
After they shafted my Scout troop in the late 1990s, please tell me the Beaverton Livejournal staff is getting shitcanned
Help us build a better map!
Probably the most insightful comment I've seen so far.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
This move will be good for SA, because LiveJournal has some excellent thinkers and programmers. Okay, their users might tend to be a bit juvenile, but LiveJournal's architecture is pretty amazing. It's great what the team have managed to do with limited resources, they've developed some really hot technologies, like memcached, which even Slashdot uses now.
I just hope technology migrates from LJ to SA's products, rather than the other way round.. no TypeKey or comment spam on LJ please!
... when you're doing a Google search and blogs are cluttering up the first 200 pages of results, it's kind of hard to just "ignore them."
awww she believes in it too. cheeeeeeeeeeeeeright!
p.s. Im not affiliated with LJSM, but it is great software.
or else!
depressed :(
the hottest music podcast on the block
all i can see is LJ is gonna get better...
though i am not sure about their word about the licence part...
Don't mod jokes down just because you don't get them.
I'm not looking forward to adding ads to the teenage g@mr grlz whining.
They've ripped their commitment to keeping the site as Free Software out of their social contract (which they've renamed to 'guiding principles' anyway).
Details of the change are here.
I didn't become a member of Slashdot until the site proved it's worth. The issue that I have with the LJ sale is that they have conveniently obviated the social contract and simultaneously prevented further posting unless you agree to their authority. I have a paid subscription until X date, I should get access until X date. I understand having to agree to a new TOS to renew, but not blindsided at 7am on a Thursday.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
LJ added some pretty heavy duty hardware in the last year. I've been using them since Dec. 2000, and the service has never been better, even though I've been a paid user most of that time.
Since much of this purchase has been done with stock, it's telling that nobody seems to be stating the obvious -- is having a profit-driven, soon-to-be-publically traded company control what software goes into a major open source project a good thing?
How would we view this if, say, Yahoo purchased a site like Slashdot, and was able to decide what features went into all future releases of Slashcode? Would they refuse to add new features that might not serve Yahoo's business model, regardless of their benefit to other Slashcode sites? Would they view those sites as competitors or possible merger targets? Would they release new features desiggned to work with Slashcode that *aren't* open source and then charge people for them? And would they basically make it very hard to fork the code should people complain?
Despite having dozens of contributors, LiveJournal's code has always had one gatekeeper -- it's founder. And due to the extent of LiveJournal's code and the relative difficulty of contributing to it, few people know how to run a LJ code site, much less know the code well enough to fork it.
To me, this deal feels like it has the makings of a "lock in" and a clear conflict of interest. It certainly undercuts the volunteer-run/open-source aspect of the site.
Considering that most consumers are willing to pay $0.38 for blogging (average donation to Movable Type), how the heck do these companies plan on making a long term biz?
Sale of `blog' service raises privacy concerns A small bit, continued on page 4, but interesting that they're tracking the story that quickly rather than saving it for Monday's weekly @ section. (P.4 also has a picture of Hitachi's domino-sized "Mikey" 500GB drive. Cool!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
LiveJournal is different because LiveJournal is different. The process of adding new code to Slashcode is pretty much transparent, whereas the sole gatekeeper for LiveJournal's source code now works for SixApart... and even he has no real control over his baby anymore. If someone creates some excellent code for LJcode sites that isn't all that great for SixApart/LiveJournal, expect it to be ignored.
Some developers at LiveJournal already see LJ as having backed out of creating open source code -- many of their newest features are not open source. See this thread.
In other words, when is open source not?
Having just paid for another year's service for which the TOS are apparently changing, I've put in several inquiries as to what process I should use to get my money back.
I wonder how many "Sorry, we're not doing that"'s I'll have to listen to before I do get my money back?
I use LJ and I've raised some interesting points. I hope I get a response that isn't Lawyerese for "stick this spiked dildo up your ass".
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Actually I think /. was bought by Andover who in turn was bought by OSTG by its previous name or something.
/. by SELLING OUT instead of developing their own business to slingshot with the publicity of /.
And yes, many of us had arguments against commercializing
Not trying to start a bitchfest, but it is how I felt about it on many levels.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Beaverton, OR: Due to personal greed, Brad Fitzpatrick has single-handedly unleashed over 5 million whining emo-punk bloggers, Paypal scam artists and just plain weirdos onto the Internet.
"I was sick of their shit", Fitzpatrick told reporters earlier today, "I mean, how many times can some mediocre-looking chick post a picture of herself and say 'Dang! Don't I look teh sexah in this? Donate money to my PayPal account and I'll show you my boobs, or maybe I'll blow you if you come visit me in Portland'? How many uneducated political opinions can be posted on the web before it collapses under sheer ennui? How many times does one have to be told that nobody gives a shit about you and your family before it sinks in?
"I mean, really. Y'all have more computing power on your desks than Project Apollo, and this is what you use it for? It's time to end the era of the mundane blog, so fuck you, I'm taking the money and running. Turn off your fucking computers and go outside for once in your miserable whining lives."
CERT has been alerted to this sale and is initiating emergency procedures to deal with the expected onslaught of juvenile, tattoo'd, mentally ill sluts, depressed housewives and ass-kissing single men with poor hygiene habits looking to score some 'net pussy.
Details at 11.
See press release.
Google = Flickr + Moveable Type (&Livejournal) + Ecto/Marsedit + NetNewsWire + something +something, etc etc I wrote about this yesterday, and how there needs to be more consolidation in this market place to compete effectively.
http://www.jamesmcmurry.com
In the end, we ended up doing lots of work moving people to WordPress.
Why didn't you just stick with MT 2.6? That's what I've done on our colo. I'm tempted by WordPress, but so far I haven't found any major reason to switch.
I understand your concerns with the big MT licensing debacle, but then SA admits it was a debacle, and they substantially changed the pricing structure as a result. Now they've seen how hard the community can bite, I'd be surprised if they'll easily tread on 6.5 million users.
"I can't believe this is news worthy. Who cares about online journal company buyouts...haha.."
Oh...nobody really...only about 5 million Live Journal Users. I was reading some of the posts about this on LJ yesterday and someone asked Brad about the "slashdot effect" hitting LJ. His response was that it was only a minor blip since typical LJ traffic is magnitudes greater than slashdot.
Perhaps you need to read just a few more news worthy articles like this to get back in touch with what is going on in the world.
this is loaner...my sig is in the shop
I'm especially amused by her attempts to sound smrt, followed by her head being handed to her on a plate.
Oke, all the big heads at SixApart and Danga confirm that LJ, MT and TypePad will stay independent entities/business divisions.
They also said LJ will stay opensource and there will be no crossover effect between services like TypePad and LJ in terms of functions and communities.
Questions? Sure!
1. Why buy a huge community that hardly makes any money? LJ is mostly for free and hardly makes big cash. Why buy the user base if you could build the technology yourself and try to get more paying customers. The only 'hard' answer can only be time. SixApart needs 'weight' and buying LJ will provide some impressive numbers in terms of users - but hardly in turnover.
2. Why buy incompatible systems? In the LJ FAQ about the whole affair you can read that both companies like/use PERL. Oh boy! Overall I am only impressed by LJs massive blog handling - but not by it's webware - nor am I impressed by the new releases of MT. I consider them neither very sophisticated nor state of the art.
3. Do you build communities or technoloy? LJ is about community building (with no sense of exploiting them). MT was about providing commercial blogging apps. A new company should merge a better business practices with a huge community and better tools. But I really wonder if this will work? SixApart has an unhappy history of customer relationships, they used to be advanced in terms of bloggings apps (which is not a huge achievement), while LJ only excels in pure numbers and handling massive requests. So where is the beef?
4. How you gonna stop the competition? Except Blogger/Google neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have seriously started to push the blogging market - just because they know that the market is still not mature enough to make serious money. But in terms of technology creating a blogging software and infrastructure is hardly a challenge for these companies. And they also have loads of eyeballs. Of course SixApart won't tell us what they have in mind - but today there is no safety in numbers.
5. What about the public response and it's handling? I suggest SixApart to get themselves some clever PR people. So far the LJ community more or less wet their pants. Most MT or TypePad users don't give a ****. SixApart once had a big cooleness factor on their side - sort of Apple of the blogging scene. They have lost that touch - and it's hard to regain. So far SixApart has failed to create a positive buzz about the whole affair and create some curious customers to maybe buy or subscribe to their much pricier services or products. So far I would consider this the biggest failure so far for the whole affair.
Considering that LJ wasn't founded until 1999, and at the time it was located in Seattle in Brad's UW dorm room, it seems unlikely they bought wreaths from you in Beaverton in the late 90's. LJ didn't even have an office until 2003, prior to that it was run out of wherever Brad was living at the time. Perhaps you're confusing them with the previous occupants of the office space they're renting? Incidentaly, no, the staff is not being fired, they're relocating to San Fran.
Read this post.
There are at least a dozen people buzzing around LiveJournal who either are or were once contributors to the project. All of them would be able to start a fork if it became necessary, and there's nothing that can be added that the open source contributors couldn't recreate. One look at the LJ source code shows that there's no exceptional skill at Danga, it just happens that those people have traditionally been the gatekeepers which all of the non-staff developers have had to butt-lick to get code in CVS.
Take a look at their bug tracker and observe all of the perfectly-sensible contributions that have been ignored due to the arrogance of the Danga staff, and the responses they give to people's work. Personally, I don't know why the OS developers bothered given the obvious sour environment, but I get the impression that there's enough pent-up hostility there that at least some of them would be very quick to lash out and fork if the new administration does anything distasteful. It'll be interesting to see what they do in the next few weeks as the situation sinks in.
"person" was lying.
Of course things aren't going to go to heck tomorrow. As the Six Apart owners points out, they just bought the place and don't want to destroy their new toy just yet. And heck, they probably get themselves a PR boost by being able to claim a massive increase in the numbers of people using services they own. Perhaps even some more business from LJ users pleased with the promised upgrades. But in the long term, what are they going to do?
A) Keep Live Journal at its existing level of performance, providing a totally free competitor to their own paid services that's more than sufficient for 99.9% of the Net or,
B) Implement changes that make being a free LJ user a lot less desireable.
As a business, let me think about that one for a minute. With choice B, even if we drive off 99% of LJ's current 5.5 million users and only get 1% to switch over to paid service, we're getting 50K new customers while dramatically lowering overhead/bandwidth for upkeeping the exponentially expanding LJ community. We don't even need to be the "bad" guys by implementing any cruel and unusual license agreements. All we need to do is put hardware upgrades for unpaid users at the bottom of the priority list until people leave on their own. I forget, was there a choice of some sort in there?
Trackbacks suck. Believe me, it's not worth it. I've moved from LiveJournal to my own WordPress-based blog, and trackbacks is one of the last features I'm excited about. I got tired of all the trackback spam coming my way, and I disabled trackbacks for good.
Alternative: If you want to know who's linking to your blog -- whether or not they've trackbacked you -- you should look at Bloglines. Even if you don't use Bloglines, someone who reads your blog probably does, and Bloglines knows about which blogs are linking to you.
Please buy Slashdot's User Journals.
That way, we can have some actual features.
Signed,
The Slashdot Journal Community
If you're reading Slashdot, one would assume that you're net-savvy enough to understand this ridiculously old acronym.
*rolls eyes*
"If you want to run for the hills and backup your journal and move to another service, feel free, but hopefully you'll be back in 6 months when we've proven ourselves."
That's good advice nowso more than ever. I ran for the hills and, honestly, I doubt I'll be back in 6 months. ModBlog offers unlimited image space, full image gallery, free domain forwarding/pointing, live-time stats, no ads, chatterbox, RSS feed, music playlist import and way more is hard to beat. Did I mention it's all free without ads? There isn't even a "paid" or "premium" option because it's all already free!
Since Brad neglected to give the link, I will.
http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml
Exported from LiveJournal (XML) -> Imported into ModBlog. Blam. Done. That easy. Literally.
No, this isn't an ad or spam. I'm just saying... it worked for me. And since Brad said to, don't we owe it to ourselves to follow the directions of our Fearless Leader? http://www.ModBlog.com
Well chalk it up to a learning experience, bozo.
No one's going to spell out acronyms. That's what acronyms are for, is not fucking spelling it out. If you want someone to hold your hand, go back to AOL. Either that or learn to look shit up
You've got the most powerful information retrieval tool in history sitting at your fingertips, grow a fucking brain and use it.