LJ

[perlmonger]

I don't (yet) know if the rumour that Brad is going to sell LJ to Six Apart has any truth behind it, but all I can say to danah boyd's posting on the issue is Word.

If it does happen, I suspect that LJ will end up a shell; an expanding enhanced-sharedholder-value shell perhaps (at least for a while), but ultimately a dead thing.

We'll see.

Comments

[captainblue.livejournal.com]

That would be awful ~:0(

[sneerpout.livejournal.com]

I will be devastated if LJ ends in its current form. I have no interest in running a bogstandard regular blog that I have no way of moderating access to.

Writing for an audience on a platform accessible to all is something I've been doing all my adult life. It's called journalism and I don't do it for free. My journal is my own space where I can write about anything that pleases me or, more commonly, does not, and I do it for myself and the people I respect, like and trust.

*sigh*

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

it's the community aspect of LJ that I'd miss - I've met some really good people here ...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. Exactly so.

(Though I am clearly not of the fourth estate)

I've attempted webloggage once or twice as an experiment and it just feels entirely wrong. I've also met (and indeed have been priveliged to see the inner life of those I knew from Whitby/Slime/Usenet) far too many fine people to just walk away from this thing.

I feel more discomfited by this news than I would have expected.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

No doubt there would be alternatives, possibly based upon the same code, but I suppose not everyone would move to the same one. =:-/

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

mmm... it all depends how much they sell it for, but I'm slightly concerned. Back of envelope musing : currently LJ has a rough income of 2-2.5M$. Since a company is typically sold for say 3x turnover, they need to get back their investment. Within a year that means 440,000 paid accounts (unachievable in a population of under a million regular users) or in three years 147,000 paid users (achievable? theoretically possible, but unlikely).

I wonder what the business case is.. the fundamental problem is that free LJ accounts are too good, but restricting them would cripple the community. LJ as a group isnt a set of people that can be marketed to, either. The technology behind LJ isnt particularly sophisticated, so I dont see any sufficiently valuable IP.

The best option is probably for them to see LJ as a long term project - to add new tags to link movable type and LJ communities and generally leave well alone..

[hirez.livejournal.com]

If I put my ex-dotcom hat on, I could say 'It's about growing the userbase and worry about monetizing that later' but thankfully that garment no longer fits.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the userbase are the set of people who wouldn't want anything to do with the friendless latte-hoovering scum who keep 'blogs'.

LJ's USP is the access control. That alone makes it a completely different thing from MT and analogues. I suppose some random cross-realm hackery could make LJ and TypePad identities trust one another... Hmm...