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."

Changes

[tuxter]

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.

Re:Well

[Anubis350]

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?

[Rakishi]

You are assuming that LJ doesn't make money already.

Though everyone complains about LJ...

[shawnywany]

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.

Re:What's the business model?

[FleaPlus]

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:Changes

[NeoChaosX]

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 ran into a "The document does not exist" error while surfing LJ, I'd probably have enough to keep a Paid LJ account for life. They need to get more bandwidth, faster server, or both.

Not so easy to ignore sometimes..

[EvilStein]

... 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:Nervous

[idiotnot]

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] shared among about 70 people. We had quite a few users who were using MT to host blogs. Mind you, this is a community machine, composed of donated hardware, run with donated power and bandwidth. SixApart refused to give us a free license for the new version. They wanted $500, or whatever it was. They said that we could do the individual install thing, but we would have had to have each user install his own copy of MT. Because some of our users aren't geeks, this was really out-of-the question.

In the end, we ended up doing lots of work moving people to WordPress. But I really don't want to do business with SixApart after the way they handled MT. So, I think I probably be taking down my LJ sometime soon. It's sad, really, because I do enjoy using it.

Just my $0.02.

Re:Not so easy to ignore sometimes..

[EvilStein]

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 for something and find nothing but blogs linking to "it" ("it" being an article you're looking for) but "it" is now a 404. Example: Dell put up a funny ad. Lots and lots of bloggers were posting about it and linking to the LA Times website. Well, the LA Times expired that image. None of the bloggers mirrored it, so now they're all linking to something that isn't there anymore.

It's just kind of annoying overall. :|

Re:Will this affect supervision/abuse?

[L.Bob.Rife]

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.

Re:Though everyone complains about LJ...

[mdwh2]

Yes but the issue is not whether I know about RSS readers and can be bothered to download and use one, it's whether I can convince 150+ of my LJ readers to do so. Just about everyone I know has an LJ, but few if any are using RSS readers.

Also RSS readers alone don't solve the problem of private "friends only" posting (afaik) - someone would still need an LJ account to be able to read my non-public entries, so once they've done that, it's usually easier to just use the Friends page system. If I was hosting my journal on my own website, I'd need to give people an account/password just to read the non-public entries of my journal, which is more hassle.