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."

Little will change...?

Sure, just like they weren't being bought...

Thank goodness for TrackBack

TrackBack [wikipedia.org] 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.

Story from previous day

So, I guess when "sources close to Brad Fitzpatrick" said that LiveJournal was not being sold... well, not so much eh?

Nice quote

Here's [sixapart.com] 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).

Hey, amateur porn is where it's at...

So long as the amateur porn stays in place, and I can continue to co-admin my porn community [livejournal.com], 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

Correction

SA is buying Livejournal fromDanga, they are not buying Danga itself.

Re:Correction

I believe your post is technically correct but it's also misleading. Six Apart may not be buying Danga but the Danga employees will be moving to San Francisco, at least according to the news post:

What happens to the Danga employees?
We're moving to San

Re:Correction

Someone asked Brad directly if it was Danga or just LJ that was being sold and he stated it was all of it [livejournal.com].

Stephen

Six Apart v Google

"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.

Though everyone complains about LJ...

I tried getting my journal back on my domain for good, but I just cannot leave a couple of Livejournal's features.

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 [livejournal.com] 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.

LJ Backup/Export to XML

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 [homeip.net]

Any comments are welcome.. released under the BSD license.

Re:LJ Backup/Export to XML

http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml

Nervous

Okay, being a five-year user of LJ (user number 1112 [livejournal.com], 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.

Re:Nervous

I haven't been on LJ nearly that long, but I share your concerns.

I don't trust SixApart as far as I can throw them. That Brad does is all well and good, but I don't. Not after what they did with the MT license. I help maintain a community machine [757.org] share

As a livejournal user...

I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.

Re:Ads already in place

Er, did you bother to go look at her references?

It's quite clear (especially if you actually go look at the pages she cites) that she's been spywared.

Re:Ads already in place

The person reporting the ads seems to be the only person seeing them. Therefore, "Person" is reporting ads, not "People." And it could very well be spyware.

The people running LiveJournal seem to be quite aware of an average user's worries about the projec

Re:Changes

One thing I hope they change is getting more / faster servers. That site is really slow. Sadly, all my friends blog on it. So, I have to brave the slowness every once in awhile.

Another thing that I hope they change, though it has no bearing on me since I don't blog there, is their theme system. It's pretty convoluted to learn. I don't know why they don't just let you use CSS. 90% of the custom themes I've seen could be done with the right HTML and some CSS. At least then after you spent hours working on your LJ page with CSS, you could use it in the "real world." After learning LJ formatting, all you can do is format LJ (AFAIK).

Re:Changes

One thing I hope they change is getting more / faster servers. That site is really slow. Sadly, all my friends blog on it. So, I have to brave the slowness every once in awhile.

Agree here. If I had a nickel for everytime the server timed out on me or I

Re:Changes

It's only slow if you don't have a paid account. I agree that their theme systems (both of them) are totally from hell.

Re:Well

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

Re:What's the business model?

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.

Re:What's the business model?

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 o

Not so easy to ignore sometimes..

... 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."

Re:Not so easy to ignore sometimes..

You're certainly right - my point was that sometimes it's not so easy to ignore blogs because there are so many of them with that trackback feature, that it's becoming very easy for them to clutter up search engines. It's even worse when you are looking fo