andrewducker | Not so bad as first thought, still not great

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.