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LiveJournal

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LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is the name of a weblog site allowing Internet users to keep an online journal or diary. It is also the name of the open source server software that was designed to run it. LiveJournal's differences from other blogging sites include its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to Friendster.

LiveJournal was started in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company owned by Fitzpatrick which operates LiveJournal.

Features

A number of features distinguish LiveJournal from other sites, one of which is the "Friends Page," a list of the most recent posts from people a user has added to their "Friends List" (sometimes shortened to "flist") — turning LiveJournal into a community of interconnected weblogs, and shifting it toward being social network software. Another such distinguishing feature is the employment of the S2 template system to allow users to customize the appearance and behaviour of their weblogs.

Similar to other online services, users may upload a small graphical icon, referred to as "userpic" or "icon" by LiveJournal users, by which to define one's self to the rest of the community (this user picture functions as the user's avatar). This optional small image may take a maximum viewing size of 100 by 100 pixels. LiveJournal's free users, which account for approximately 98% of the network, have a limit of 6 interchangeable icons. Paid account holders, which account for 1.6% of the network, may have up to fifteen, and can pay optional fees to get a total of one hundred user picture slots. Holders of permanent accounts have one hundred icons as standard.

The selected user icon will, if present, appear next to posts on individual user pages, and on the "Friends Pages" of other users who have "friended" them. The user's default icon will also appear prominently on the user's main journal page.

Each user also has a "User Info" page, which is used to describe personal interests. It can contain a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources), and lists of friends, interests, and communities to which the user belongs.

Community

Demographics

As of mid-November 2005, over 8.7 million accounts had been created, of which almost 1.4 million had been updated at some point in the last 30 days [1]. Of those users who provided their date of birth, the vast majority were in the 15-23 age group. Of those who specified a gender, more than two thirds were female. This is notable because most internet media are dominated by males.

LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries (although there is a language selection feature), and the United States has by far the most LiveJournal users among users who choose to list a location. There is also a sizable Russian contingent, as many Russians have turned to LiveJournal as their primary blogging engine. The following are rounded figures as of mid-November 2005 (based on the information listed by the users):

The following is a breakdown of United States users, by state, as of mid-November 2005

User interaction

As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries and create a message board-style thread of comments — each comment can be replied to individually, starting a new thread. All users, including non-paying users, can set various options for comments: they can instruct the software to only accept comments from those on their Friends list (commonly referred to as a "flist" or "f-list") or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts), cause new comments to be "screened" (that is, hidden until approved by the author of the entry), or not allow commenting at all. The user has the additional option to have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address.

In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group discussion boards, or "communities," encompassing myriad subjects. (For example, there is a community dealing specifically with Wikipedia [2].) Each community has one or more maintainers who have access to the options and settings of the community account.

Some areas of LiveJournal rely heavily on user contributions and volunteer efforts [3]. In particular, the LiveJournal Support area is run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Similarly, the website is translated into other languages by volunteers, although this effort is continually degrading due to widespread frustration. Many attribute this frustration to a certain lack of involvement of LiveJournal's management in issues and problems.

The development of the LiveJournal software has seen extensive volunteer involvement in the past. In February and March 2003, there was even an effort, nicknamed the Bazaar, to boost volunteer performance by offering money in return for "wanted" enhancements or improvements [4]. The Bazaar was intended to follow a regular monthly pay-out scheme, but it ended up paying out only once, after which it was neglected without a word from the management until about one year later when it was shut down.

Nowadays, voluntary contributions to the software are considered for inclusion less and less as the company has acquired more and more paid employees who focus on the organization's commercial interests. This has led to the formation of several forks, many of which introduce new features that users would like to see at LiveJournal, especially features that are brought up repeatedly in LiveJournal's own suggestions journal (which is sometimes stereotyped to be superfluous because many regular readers feel that LiveJournal has stopped caring about ideas from users and implement only the development team's own ideas, particularly since the buyout by Six Apart).

In some cases legal and administrative concerns have led LiveJournal to prohibit some people from volunteering.

Notable users and journals

Certain LiveJournals have become famous throughout the years for their especially interesting content, including political commentary and anecdotal advice on subjects ranging from household care to aquariums, or because they belong to otherwise famous or accomplished people, including many well-known writers, graphic artists, mass media personalities, programmers, etc.

Other LiveJournals have instead gained notoriety for the infamy of their owners. See, for example,

The instances of LiveJournal having a wider impact on the outside world include

  • homeless_at_nyu. In 2004, the LiveJournal of homeless New York University (NYU) student Steve Stanzak gained nationwide attention. Stanzak had lived in the NYU library for 8 months, being unable to afford the expensive cost of housing, and chronicled his plight in his LiveJournal. His weblog ultimately caught the attention of the media and school board, who provided him with temporary free housing and increased his financial aid. [5]
  • ea_spouse. Another user who generated wide discussion was the still anonymous user known as ea spouse. This user created a journal solely to make claims about unethical and possibly illegal business practices in use at EA Games. In November of 2004, the truth of those claims was disputed for several days on such sites as Penny Arcade and Slashdot, until a little over a week later a still-pending class action lawsuit was launched against EA over back pay.
  • interdictor. Michael Barnett, an internet company's crisis manager who witnessed Hurricane Katrina firsthand from a datacenter in the Central Business District of New Orleans and documented it in his blog, becoming famous virtually overnight.

Controversial or dramatic LiveJournal entries can quickly attract thousands of comments, as users are quickly alerted to noteworthy posts by the robust social network, or external sites such as Encyclopædia Dramatica or LJ Drama, which categorize and link to them.

Frank the Goat

File:Frank the goat.gif

Frank the Goat is LiveJournal's mascot. Frank is treated like an actual living being by much of the LiveJournal userbase, and his brief "biography" as well as his "journal" reflect this.

Sometimes, callers to LiveJournal's PhonePost service are informed "Frank the Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly [6].


Social networking

The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternary (with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends (friend is also used as a verb to describe these) mutually, or either friend the other without reciprocation.

The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term; however, because the term 'friend" is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz, as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used in this way; this conflict is discussed in greater detail below.

A user's list of friends (a.k.a. flist) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users. Generally, "friending" allows the friends of a user to read protected entries and causes the friends' entries to appear on the user's "friends page". Friends can also be grouped together in "friends groups", allowing for more complex behavior in both of these features.

The dual usage of "friend" as those one reads and those one trusts doesn't necessarily match the definition of the word used in everyday speech. Even the individual users on a user's friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships, general interest, and courtesy (a user friending back someone who friended them). Sometimes a friends list represents something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection, a puzzle, or something random with no social significance whatsoever.

The fact that "friend" is used, without qualification, to describe vastly different things in the LiveJournal community is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. This is intensified by the fact that friending and defriending (adding or removing another user from your Friends list) is as simple as clicking a button, while real-life friendships are formed and unmade over longer periods of time. Since creating a friend relationship on LiveJournal does not require permission or action on the part of anyone but a single user, any user can friend any other user. Many users are sensitive to being listed as a "friend of" a controversial user or someone whom they actively dislike. To combat this, a feature was created for users to hide the entire list of others who have listed them as a friend [7].

On April Fool's Day, 2004, the Livejournal staff pulled a prank on all users by changing the terms "friend" and "friend of" to "stalking" and "stalked by." Though many users wanted to keep these terms, it caused controversy, particularly with those who had been victims of stalking. [8]

Despite these problems, the word friend continues to be used to define these multi-faceted relationships on LiveJournal. This possibly reflects the designers' intent to have LiveJournal become more like an off-line community than some other purely on-line organizational structure.

Controversies

Invite system

From September 2, 2001 until December 12, 2003, the growth of LiveJournal was put under control by an "invite code" system. This was because the number of users was increasing faster than the server architecture could handle. New users needed to either obtain an invite code from an existing user or buy a paid account (which reverts to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system also had the side effect of helping to prevent abuse by deterring people from creating multiple throw-away accounts. The invite code system was lifted after a number of major improvements to the overall site architecture.

The removal of the invite code system was met with mixed feelings and a surprisingly large amount of opposition. A number of users felt the invite code system gave LiveJournal a touch of elitism, or a closed-community feel. Others, including LiveJournal's management, pointed out that when first introduced, the invite code system was intended to be temporary.

Abuse team decisions

As LiveJournal has grown, it has had to deal with issues involving the content it hosts. Like most web logging hosts, it has adopted a basic Terms of Service [9]. The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as spamming, copyright violation, harassment, etc. LiveJournal created an abuse team and processes to handle claims about violations of the Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the law, and other issues.

The abuse team at LiveJournal has frequently come under criticism for their handling of alleged violations. Many users felt the abuse team over-reacted to cases in disregard of the actual Terms of Service (or the reverse, that it disregards blatant Terms of Service violations). A small controversy arose in November 2004 when a policy document used by the abuse team was leaked to a group of its critics before it was due to be released. Comparisons between the policy and the Terms of Service were inevitable, with some feeling that the former were more restrictive than the latter, and others believing that the Terms of Service are very wide in scope and encompass everything within the policy document. The policy document has since been officially released [10], as it had been intended to be.

A small number of users who have been affected by abuse team policies have made the decision to abandon LiveJournal in favor of other blogging sites, though the number of such users is very small compared to LiveJournal's total user-base. It has, however, exacerbated the opinion held by some that LiveJournal is a fine host for teenage diaries and social networking but cannot be a platform for serious web journaling. Others feel that the abuse team is performing a worthwhile job, banning only those with ill intentions and histories of clear Terms of Service violations. In their opinion LiveJournal is a viable choice for serious web publishing, so long as one does not wish to cause trouble.

Sale to Six Apart

LiveJournal's parent company, Danga Interactive, was initially formed and held entirely by Fitzpatrick. However, as LiveJournal's popularity gained, Fitzpatrick was approached by many others to sell the popular journaling service. He initially resisted many of these offers, not wanting his pet project (which he has characterized as his "baby") in the hands of those who did not understand the site's core principles--reliance on paid memberships to fund site operations, the absence of advertising, the volunteer support model, and LiveJournal's support of the free software movement. Nonetheless, as the administrative aspect of LiveJournal began to consume more of Fitzpatrick's time, which he would have rather spent working on the site's technical workings, he began to take the acquisition offers more seriously.

Finally, Fitzpatrick was approached by Ben and Mena Trott, co-founders of Six Apart, who gained his trust and seemed to understand LiveJournal's core principles. He felt that a sale to Six Apart would allow him to focus on technical aspects of the site, while Six Apart's usability and design expertise could improve LiveJournal. Six Apart was interested in buying Danga and LiveJournal to complement their other blogging products.

Community reaction

Rumors of Danga's impending sale to Six Apart were first reported by Business 2.0 journalist Om Malik in his blog, on 4 January 2005.[11] The rumor immediately spread, as users began to speculate (and some panic) about the prospect of the sale of LiveJournal's parent company.[12] [13] [14] [15] By the next evening, speculation of major changes, including a rumor that LiveJournal would require non-paying users to purchase memberships, had caused enough users to backup their journals to impact the site's performance.[16] A few hours later, Fitzpatrick confirmed the sale, and insisted the site's core principles would not be discarded by the new ownership.[17] He also stressed that he and other Danga employees would still continue to manage LiveJournal and that he had determined that Six Apart was committed to the site's core principles before selling.

While the userbase was generally supportive of Fitzpatrick's decision, a few have questioned the deal, objecting to Six Apart's sale of proprietary software, or objecting to changes in LiveJournal's "Guiding Principles" document [18]. In addition, some users had developed a trust of Fitzpatrick, but felt that the sale of Danga to an outside company meant that Fitzpatrick was not ultimately in control of the site.

Fitzpatrick's supporters offered rebuttals to many of these arguments.[19] They noted that the bulk of the code running LiveJournal at the time of the acquisition would continue to be open source, as it was licensed under the GPL. Furthermore, it was noted, most of the changes to the "Social Contract"/"Guiding Principles" document were minor rewordings to prevent legal problems. (The document was never a binding legal contract.)

Others argued that Fitzpatrick, as the sole owner of Danga Interactive, had every right to sell the site, without first consulting the users.

Finally, Fitzpatrick himself noted he was growing tired of the administrative aspects of the site — to the point where he had contemplated shutting down the service — and "I knew I would've shut down the site on my own if I didn't get help."[20]

Other sites running the LiveJournal engine

The software running LiveJournal is open source and primarily written in Perl. Because of this, many other communities have been designed using the LiveJournal software. However, with the exception of DeadJournal and GreatestJournal, these tend to be unstable and short-lived. An example of this is the August 2004 closing of uJournal, which temporarily left approximately 100,000 accounts without hosting before the content was moved to AboutMyLife. Another is Journalfen, which for much of its existence has suffered from frequent downtime and now is assailed by spam in the comments of journals, despite its main focus being a single group of communities.

LiveJournal timeline

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

See also

  • LJ Drama, site that details and satirizes events within the LiveJournal community

Media attention

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