So. Facebook. $35 billion valuation; 600 million users; 25% of all US Web traffic — and all that with fewer employees than Google has job openings. The inventor of the World Wide Web recently warned that the web may be endangered by Facebook’s colossal walled garden. A Google engineer was recently paid $3.5 million to not jump ship to work there. Facebook seems an unstoppable juggernaut. And I kind of want them to die.
Not because of their policies. They’ve been reasonably sensitive to their users’ wants, and willing to admit when they were wrong (remember Facebook Beacon?) There have been worrying signs of late, for example, their two-faced attitude towards data portability and their trademarking of the word “Face”, but I don’t (yet) object to what they do.
I dislike Facebook because they’re mediocre. They have a platform and opportunity unlike anyone else, ever—and what have they done with it? Nothing. None of their so-called innovations are actually even remotely so. Copying Twitter was smart, but hardly new; ditto Foursquare. They called Facebook Groups an innovation; it’s a basic feature they should have implemented years ago. Now they’re laughably trying to claim that integrating email into their messaging system is a world-shaking revolution. → Read More
It’s notoriously hard for bloggers with a limited audience to monetize the traffic generated by the content they self-publish, and LiveJournal users are no exception. Now LiveJournal has added a program dubbed ‘Your Journal – Your Money’ which should help users monetize their blogs or journals using Google AdSense.
Important caveat: only users with paid accounts are eligible for the program.
Here’s the deal: users who cough up between $5 for 2 months or $25 for 12 months of using LiveJournal, can add Google AdSense banners to their blog and keep 100% of the earnings (after Google takes their cut). They will be required to sign up for a Google AdSense account or associate an existing account to start earning revenue from displaying Google ads. Users who enter the program can control where ads appear and whether they’re text, images, or both. → Read More
Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal spent yesterday battling a DDOS attack that started around 6 am California time. Twitter and LiveJournal went down hard, Facebook stayed mostly online but was clearly under strain. CNET reports that a single individual’s accounts on the services may have been the primary target.
Now, nearly 24 hours later, Facebook and LiveJournal appear to be performing normally. But Twitter is down completely and has been for the last few hours. → Read More
Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture. “This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaining brands going forward” he added. Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago. CrunchBase Information Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
LiveJournal just announced that they will soon begin offering sponsored communities with benefits to participating users and sponsored features provided by companies other than LiveJournal. The SixApart owned social networking site has slowly rolled these plans out over recent months but just made the official announcement tonight. Early feedback from users is decidedly negative. Update: Here’s the newest from the company on this, it appears that they backed down on much of the original plans. Sponsored communities will be groups sponsored by advertisers who are offering group members things like exclusive movie trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, travel advice, tips and tricks, special deals. It’s funny, I thought most of that was already freely available all over the internet. There is some potential here, and this is an increasingly common direction for social networks to move in, but it will be a difficult strategy to pull off in a compelling way. The second part of the plan seems much more viable. Sponsored features will be technical add-ons that LiveJournal hasn’t offered its users so far. The first will be an SMS integration service sponsored by Amp’dMobile. This make some sense and it will be good to see what kind of creative features are provided by partners. Two concerns that arise: the baby could get thrown out with the bath water in that users could be so upset at seeing their alternative to MySpace growing increasingly ad driven that they don’t care about the ad sponsored special features. LiveJournal offers paid accounts already and some users will undoubtedly feel that if they’ve paid for an account, they don’t want to see ads. The new sponsored SMS service, though, will be available only to paid members. That makes sense to cut down on abuse, but we’ll see how those users respond to both paying and seeing ads. With social networking sites becoming either a dime a dozen or worth a billion dollars, depending on how you look at it, there’s an interesting balance being sought between the need to profit and the need to keep allegedly fickle users happy. A second concern is that the sponsored features strategy seems to conflict with the spirit of open APIs. LiveJournal uses not the MetaWeblog API or the Blogger API, but one of its own. It’s been praised as good to work with, but not a lot of people apparently do. Is there some kind of artificial → Read More
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