recalling what he wrote about the sale at the time, it seemed like he enjoyed the coding, but was not happy about all the administrivia it took to keep the site running. he felt he was passing off all the boring parts of the job to six apart.
must not have worked out that way though, because he didn't stay at six apart very long. i vaguely recall him writing something about how he'd been doing livejournal so long that it had finally gotten tedious for him, and he was ready for something else. could be true, or it could be that things didn't work out with six apart the way he'd hoped.
I don't understand the attraction of LiveJournal in the era of Wordpress, Facebook, and Twitter. Was it a sad day when they started winding down Friendster?
And LiveJournal became really popular with certain subcultures. You're able to do friends-only entries, there's a login system for comments and such for your friends, etc. Great for someone who hates the world and wants to share it with a few others. It also allows you follow others on LJ in a way that you can't with Facebook and that Wordpress requires RSS/Atom. It appeals to some. Not everyone wants a public blog (WP), not everyone wants the randomness of Facebook's feed, not everyone wants a 140 character limit. . .
Facebook's real names thing can deter some postings and its closed nature means you don't get random subcultures becoming prevalent as much as you get more mainstream stuff. Twitter isn't a competitor really and Wordpress doesn't have the same features of authentication, friends, etc.
LJ doesn't appeal to me, but I can see why it does for some.
A network effect implies that you get more value from using it the more people do use it. But LiveJournal is just a blog. I can read anyone's LiveJournal without joining.
AIM, on the other hand, you have to join to use, which is why we're all still running the ridiculously baroque OSCAR protocol.
no, you cannot read anyone's livejournal without joining. many people make some or all of their entries friends-only, which can only be read by people on their friends list.
it's features like this one, and many others, that make connectedness with friends much stronger than on traditional blogging platforms.
To add a bit, LJ users can leave comments attached to their accounts and so comments become "by someone" in a way that blog comments aren't always. Likewise, you can look through the friends lists of people you're friends with and see if you like their stuff. It's not a great network affect like AIM or Facebook, but it's definitely there.
I have a lifetime account on livejournal. An LJ friend actually bought it for me (I was very surprised). I love the service and use it as an online diary. It has novelty to those of us who want that. Plus some of us started with it many years ago (2001 for me) and never left.
I suspect that the draw of LiveJournal is very similar to the initial draw of AIM, Y!IM or MSN. People tend to go where there friends are. I don't care how much better or more open Google Talk is, if all my friends are on AIM, it doesn't help me (hypothetically speaking since I can now use GTalk to talk on AIM.)
Another thing to consider is that LJ does do a decent job of aggregating 'friendfeeds' from other LJers (and has been doing this since well before Twitter or FriendFeed existed), so it's really easy to look, at a glance, at what my friends are up to, which isn't so easy from an out of the box Wordpress.
That said, as a long time user, I agree that LJ does suck, and has iterated at a snail-like pace, but it serves a purpose, and has some non-obvious features that make it better than some of its more flashy competitors.
LJ has by far the strongest network effect of any blogging service -- Twitter is the first thing to really compete with them on that, and is pretty close.
LJ also had an enourmous first-mover advantage, but became stagnant after a while, and then were driven into the ground by SixApart. Instead of improving the service, SA made a tone-deaf clone (Vox), and began directly antagonizing their entire userbase.
There are a bunch of very obvious things that LJ could have done. For example, it does photo hosting, but there's no way to link a photo with users, like Facebook's tagging. It has a calendar and to-do lists, but has no event planning features (again like FB does). It definitely stagnated, and has definitely annoyed its users, but there's enormous inertia, since people want to be where their friends are. If a migration off happens, tho', for the same reason, it'll be brutally quick.
I'd compare Livejournal to Tumblr more than any other contemporary tool. They both recognize public/private on a per-post basis (other software makes you all in or all out w/public-ness).
While I agree with that statement in general, LiveJournal has a much stronger network effect than Wordpress does, in my experience.
Of course, I've never used the wordpress hosted blogs, so I could be completely wrong, but at least with an out of the box wordpress installation, there's no immediate way to check in on your friends, or see who you're friends with, etc. LJ offers these services in a fairly straightforward fashion.
WordPress has no network effect, but it's a strong substitute for LJ's crappy publishing platform. Facebook and Twitter have huge network effects, and both link pretty well with WordPress. It's the combination of WordPress+Facebook+Twitter (all free) that seems like the better option.
