Not so bad as first thought, still not great

[andrewducker]

Cheers for the various people who've updated me on the LJ situation.  Losing half the staff is better than losing nearly all of them - but still doesn't show a lot of confidence in the future.

Chatting to marrog, it's clear that this whole "dependency on a single site" thing is not good in the long term.  Some mixture of OAuth, RSS and OpenID seems to be in order to allow us to aggregate our friends writings from all over the internet, share what we want with who we want, and have control over who leaves us comments.  It's not there yet, but I'm sure it will some day - hopefully before LJ dies its eventual death.

Which I don't expect to be this year.  The problem with LJ doesn't seem to be that it makes no money - but that it doesn't make enough to justify a staff of 30 people.  Most of you don't pay LJ any money - and you're probably using adblock too.  Which means that if it's going to be worth anything to its owners it's going to have to run in a lean and cheap manner.  They recently moved to a new datacenter, and I'd be very surprised if this round of layoffs wasn't held over until after that move, to make it all run smoothly.

To be honest, there's nowhere out there that's as good as LJ at what it does.  I'm not planning to go anywhere just yet.  But I'll be keeping an eye on the weather - and if anyone has any suggestions I'll be very grateful to hear them.

Comments

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

I love LJ. And I pay for it. Happily.

[andrewducker]

Me too!

I hope there's an announcement of some kind in the near future...

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

And frankly if they want to have a few ads and still be able to run LJ then I am for it. Heck Facebook and Myspace have ads all over the place.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. This.

What's the state of DreamWidth, one asks oneself...

[andrewducker]

http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/302379.html

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Very fine.

"Death of LJ predicted. Film at eleven. Etc."

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The current owners have paid a lot of money for the site, and presumably are not seeing a lot of return on that investment. The decision to cash-cow it makes sense. If they aren't seeing the growth levels that made them pay a lot of money for it, then there is little point investing in even more development. They will presumably look to either sell it to someone else, or possibly cut their losses and milk it for the level of income it generates.

One thing is for certain, it's certainly a reminder that we are very fortunate not to work in the USA, where (depending on the state) you can fire people with a weeks notice without any requirement to pay any kind of redundancy. Nice.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Just in case ...

twitter) the_magician
facebook) chris o'shea (symbian/london)
insanejournal) the_magician
deadjournal) the_magician
vox) the_magician
greatestjournal) magicianuk

[zz]

i bought a permanent account for $100 about 6 years ago.

[soon_lee]

For the paranoid:

Does anyone archive their LJ? Journalspace.com just died. I've started using LJArchive. The two may be connected.

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

I really really like Wordpress. It's not the same thing as lj but it is very nice (I've got two!)
http://plaintrees.wordpress.com/
http://52strangers.wordpress.com/
I've spent approximately 0 time on making them look nice so far, am really meaning to get around to that.

[nameandnature]

I'm as sceptical as I was during the last epic failure about all this "we will move to the broad, sunlit uplands of a distributed system" stuff. Most people won't bother if there is any faff involved at all. The open standards (with the exception of RSS for completely public stuff) haven't really taken off because they involve faff. If Dreamwidth get something going which builds in federation, that might do it, I suppose, but that's because the attraction for most people is the Dreamwidth site itself, and the Dreamwidth developers care about federation.

I pay LJ money, mostly for the unlimited pins of stalking and the ability to edit my style to link to my comment feeds. I agree there's nothing out there like it, that I've seen.

[pinkhebe.livejournal.com]

Of course, we're fine as long as LiveJournal doesn't have an (ex-)employee like the one at JournalSpace
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/03/journalspace-drama-all-data-lost-without-backup-company-deadpooled/

[andrewducker]

LJ, thankfully, has backups :->

[cdave]

I do use Ad-block because of a few reasons, but I'd whitelist the LJ add, if they weren't powered by javascript, and blocked by noScript.