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.
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
SA is buying Livejournal fromDanga, they are not buying Danga itself.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
"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.
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
You are assuming that LJ doesn't make money already.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps we'll see livejournal being touted as a more "personal" free solution, with Movable Type touted as the more "professional" solution. I figure we'll see greater interoperability between the two, allowing LJ'ers to easily add Movable Type blogs to their friends list, and vice versa. Overall, this would lead to a greater incentive to choose LJ/MT instead of, say, Blogger.
In addition to the "compare and contrast" contributions we'll see, it's also this: in the next decade, it will be about a return to communities on the web. In the early 90s it was a bunch of local BBSs, and now the web is too big to be a "community" most of the time. People want to reach out to other people, and blogs, for better or for worse, often do that. (For worse, I know I've made fun of blogs as a way for people to be passive-aggressive to those they don't want to talk to in person.. :)
I think Six Apart wants to be a major force in that movement, in generating communities, and how communities will play into the future of the web and how we communicate with one another. For one, LJ subscribers (myself included) will be paying Six Apart AFAIK, not Danga, so there's profit there. Also, competition; the fewer games in town, or the more that you control, the better.
On a separate note, does anybody seem to see a trend with the next 'dot-com' being funded open-source, or even just homegrown, web solutions ("we're not selling the product, we're selling the service")? It seems like I've heard of quite a few open source projects getting bank from just being good for long enough.. one clear example being Linux, but also reading Mena's blog -- (paraphrased) "me and my husband released Moveable Type in 2001, when I was 24". Now they have offices in Tokyo, Paris, and San Francisco. It seems like I need to find a killer app and a web server.
... 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."
depressed :(
the hottest music podcast on the block
Ex's will always find a way to tell negative stories to mutual friends. Don't blame livejournal for your ex-gf being a bitch.
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.
Google ranks is clever like that.
/.'ed
As if the first page in the pile has a low rank, it gives off an even smaller part of this to the next page. Now, if a BIG blog which was very popular joined this, it would effect maybe 1 or 2 tiers down but after this yet again its gone.
This means only the BIG blogs can stay at the top, and anyway when googling, how many blogs do you click?
I know i never click any, not by habit but because there is none there. I guess this is due to the almost randomness of the infomation contained therein.
Oh and so you know im not bshitting about what i know about google, my sites listed top for djsmiley, djsmiley2k, tim bowers, and a few other terms...
The method? Add sensible content, add adwords, and add links to all my bookmarks.
At first when someone does something different google ranks tend to end up ranking it highly, but as soon as everyone catches on, it drops again to a normal level.
(now waiting for home PC to get
- http://www.milkme.co.uk