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.

Not being sold... like PeopleSoft?

If it's "not being sold" like PeopleSoft was "not being sold", well, then, one would guess that they really are being sold.

Why LJ?

Even if something does happen, there's always other LJ variants out there, such as DeadJournal [deadjournal.com] and GreatestJournal [greatestjournal.com] 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.

Oh no!

Chris Schmidt has, among other things, this to say:

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!

LJ staff hasn't spoken up about it yet...

See LJers freak about it here [livejournal.com].

Oh No!

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!

I find this comment totally inappropriate

since it comes with no supporting links.

timothy

Re:I find this comment totally inappropriate

http://www.livejournal.com/community/show_your_boo bs/ [livejournal.com]
http://www.livejournal.com/community/show_your_pus sy/ [livejournal.com]

i really don't think it'll matter

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!"

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 /. nerds wants to be associated with online diaries. Eeeeew.

*Only* UI?

Remember eGroups?...

If so you're probably unable to bear, as I am, the take-over-resultant Yahoo Groups interface (I pulled everything I had on there off it), and know just how awful this could be...

LJ. bleah

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.

Re:LJ. bleah

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.

How exactly is that any different from the internet itself? I could just as easily reg

One of the most popular Open Source projects?

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.

Wait for Apple ...

I think Apple might have all the rumor sites confused a bit or at least making an omission:

Just as Apple bought Soundjam from Cassidy and Greene to make iTunes, and as they bought Logic to create Garageband and their own pro audio app - I see Apple making a foray into BLOGging and possibly integrating it into .Mac. Or it could be part of the iWork bundle.

I would imagine they would go after a the biggest - either LiveJournal or Blogger.

I thought I read that the owners of Blogger are big Mac guys.

Wow

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."

LiveJournal is more interesting than you think

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 [danga.com] about the challenges and solutions they've come up with. They've also written several very interesting open source [danga.com] 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).

The hatred for random blogs

It seems to be the norm here that people dislike blogs that don't have a "purpose." What exactly is the problem with these? Is anyone here being forced to read blogs about random nonesense? Does it cause some sort of serious problem? If you want to complain about blogs, complain about the ones run by pseudo-intellectuals who feel they should have some sort of say in the world. Most of the livejournal community are just people interested in social networking. Yes, many blogs will just be random bullshit that no one except the poster will ever care about. But, so what? The people flaming blogging in general probably just need somewhere to vent outside of slashdot, a blog maybe?

LJ seems to be what most think about blogs

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.

Re:FP

If blogs are digital garbage, what does that make Java then?

Re:Sell it!!

What blog menace? Seriously, if you don't want to see any blogs, then don't. There's an entire internet out there. Or do you just like having something to complain about?

Re:Sell it!!

isn't Slashdot kindof a blog? Maybe?


No. A blog is where one person makes journal entries, and other people read it. Slashdot is a news discussion site. That's a lot different in content and format than a blog. Blogs are all about one person, Slashd

Re:Sell it!!

Gimme a couple minuets, and wikipedia won't call it a blog anymore.

Re:LiveJournal

Come on now... don't lie on your resume:

PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
Experienced programmer and designer.
Strong work ethic, ability to meet deadlines. Creative ideas and innovative attitude toward all projects.
Prudent in software engineering. Able to detect probl

LiveJournal doesn't profit through advertising...

While LJ toyed with the idea of placing adverts on the free account journals, the idea was discarded. This is largely one of the reasons that I *love* LiveJournal: they offer enough basic services for the majority of users to enjoy the site with free accounts, and enough bonus features to make it worthwhile for a small percentage of users to upgrade and thus cover LJ's costs.

While I also love /., I find many of the advertisements obnoxiously tacky and intrusive, and I have no desire to pay for the service, unfortunately.

Re:And ...?

The entire purpose of having a journal online is to share it with others. While I don't post every miniscule thought, reaction, or whine, I do record what recent experiences I found to be either interesting, insightful, or funny - sound familiar??

And I

Re:And ...?

-more customizable layouts
-more user icons
-more picture storage
-phone posting
-email posting
[e-mail] forwarding
-http://username.livejournal.com address
-able to create journals for RSS feeds
-(formerly) able to invite free users
-etc. etc.