Regarding the sale of LJ to Russian company SUP:
My comments are in
I feel like we customers are stuck in the revolving door of ownership that is LiveJournal. I look forward to reading someone’s accurate re-interpretation of these events.
As Sixapart’s financial terms remain confidential, we don’t have any idea whether they kept us long enough to make a profit, or decided we’re too much work, and dumped us.
Either way, frequent changes in ownership are rarely good, and I worry for the state of the web community I have been fervently loyal to for six and a half years.
I do hope that SUP and the new advisory board will do a better job of discussing policy changes (such as the recent controversial Adult Content default filter) that affect us intrinsically before effecting them.
I think that the owners of LiveJournal deserve to make a decent profit. I just hope our next owners show more loyalty to us wacky and quick-to-anger bloggers.
I hope you understand that while I feel my icon is appropriate in these circumstances… I’m still going to update my LJ archive ASAP.
(and later in that first post …)
Despite the risk of sounding like an unrealistic idealist, I think Brad and the original LJ staff have spoiled us for traditional corporation-consumer relationships.
We are not blogspot customers, for instance, and have much different expectations. We’re used to decisions being vetted with us. You know … like a credit union.
I don’t think Livejournal will ever be user-owned unless we prove too unruly for anyone to keep, but I think that’s the only way we’ll ever be satisfied, at this point.
yeah, i’m kind of sad about this. i just paid for another year too…great
Mine’s coming up
i’ll probably just make and host my own once it’s up. wordpress is your friend
On the one hand, Six Apart totally mismanaged pretty much everything they did with Livejournal, so it’s quite nice to see the end of them. I never did figure out if they were malicious or just incompetent.
On the other hand, I’ve heard word around that the Russian LJusers aren’t too keen on SUP (doncha love that acronym, though?). Time will tell. I’m sticking to the philosophy I had when the whole strikethrough mess happened – I’ll keep using LJ as long as it’s useful. When the majority of people I stay in touch with wind up elsewhere, I’ll go with them. So long as the elsewhere in question isn’t Facebook (which I consider useless) or Myspace (which is just plain hideous).
I tried maintaining a MySpace account, but the navigation sucks on a level that simply can’t be justified considering how popular the site is. Facebook looks very similar, so I’ve stayed away from it.
While MySpace and Facebook offer similar features to some extent, they are night and day when it comes to organization, style, and structure. I have both, and I literally only look at myspace when I have to, but I actually add to my facebook account from time to time, and I am a style nazi.
Oh, it isn’t anywhere remotely as useful as LJ, but it is no longer solely intended for college students, and has provided me with a convenient venue for posting photos and video within their own system.
LJ isn’t perfect, but it seems to be one of the best popular blogging sites out there at the moment. I am not going to panic like the rest of the intrawebz seems to be doing over Six Apart selling it, but I hope that it doesn’t bode badly for the service. To be honest, I can’t think of much that Six apart has done that has been at all useful except for creating more style options.
*nod* It’s just the idea of one -more- owner who can screw it up. :)