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phantasSo I woke up at too early an hour and couldn't go back to sleep. Since I can only run my errands after 10am, you are getting yet another ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
phantas(tick) Ponderings Post.
Today's theme? Well, LiveJournal itself!
Following the recent hectic events (meriting the reaching of the 5000 maximum mark of comments), I wrote a (long) position note on nothing to do with LJ on which I finished with the remark:
You probably didn't reach that far...
If you are reading this, chances are you have a LiveJournal account (or like reading my ramblings because you're a friend of mine). Chances are you have had that account for something like 3-5 years. Furthermore, either you got one on its early days or you've been dragged here by some friend.
LiveJournal is a great concept. It was social networking before the catch expression Web 2.0 was even invented. Furthermore, it's robust. But it's frozen as a product and it's frozen as a business medium. It's no longer news and it's being outrun by newer, AJAX sparkling sites. To put it blankly, it is not growing. A comment expanding feature and the addition of an icon to custom groups is not progress, it's tinkering. Re-writing policy guidelines is tinkering, even with all the ensuing controversy. Streamlining and simplifying the registration process is... tinkering and, besides, will not be of much use if new users are not being called in to the product in the first place!
There's a certain irony with the last one. One of the main points surrounding last week's war concerned new users and it was argued that it was of little concern to old users. The irony? LiveJournal is so not a news item these days that almost the sole caller of new users are, in fact, the old ones.
There is nothing wrong with a business model where the core strategy to call new users is through acquaintance to present users. The entire Web 2.0 concept sits on that! As a side note, there is nothing wrong with the new features, they are great features, except for the fact that they are... tinkering. The problem with that strategy is that it relies completely on keeping the old users. And with new darlings such as Twitter and Facebook (and even, dare I say it, MySpace), it will not take much for those users to start migrating to other platforms of preference. This is worsen by the fact that not only does the product need to hold on to the old users to get new users, it needs to keep a regular inflow of the latter ones in order for it not to die out.
The day Blogger decides to add privacy capabilities through registered users or Facebook (or some other social networking company) vamps out its notes feature into more of a blog, is the day LiveJournal looses its competitive advantage. Consolidated view, aka the Friends page, is but a collection of feeds, well... consolidated and presented in a pleasant way. And the thread feature is but a step away.
I do not think LiveJournal should turn into yet another Web 2.0 social networking thing; there are plenty of those around already and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years from now we see a sort of a mini dot com look-alike crash over Web 2.0. It will be nowhere near as big a crash as the one in 2000/2001 because of two factors.
One, the economic cycle as today's recession overlaps with still early stages of the boom and recessions typically run at around one each ten years. Two, there being nothing associated with it as big an investment as the networking infrastructure (at least I don't see one) nor such a strong inflow of revenues. Certainly the music and other media industry (see SXSW) and relay of news and information is seeing quite a revolution. And then there's the "connected everywhere" wave: say, for example, Perkin's $100 million venture fund launched at the end of the Apple's March 6th announcement of iPhone's SDK. But in terms of investment, it looks more like a recycling of investments than the creation of new ones.
But returning to the subject at hand: why does LJ need to grow, if it's a good, robust product that does what current users want? Google search engine has hardly changed, after all. But, of course, Google has evolved much beyond just being a company that provides a free search engine in exchange for adds. And LJ was a good product years ago but is now showing its age.
From the top of my mind, I can immediately name three crucial points why. One, its users interaction only crudely covers all the new ways users want to communicate with each other (you have to know your HTML on the comments, if you want anything other than plain text). Two, a users page is completely inflexible save for colour combination and the like. Certainly, it is highly flexible in theory but that, besides a reasonable level of CSS/HTML hacking, requires learning the completely new language and framework that is S2. Have I mentioned BML? Third, there is no other way to access the highly popular Friends page other than through its web page. Unless they have changed anything since I last checked, there is not a single way of accessing friends entries through the API. I found that the hard way.
To make matters even worst, LiveJournal's architecture is so complex and ingrained that changing any of the two last points requires a substantial re-writing not to mention completely breaking users pages, and the only thing that can be done for the first point, before bumping into the same problems, is adding bells and whistles to the comments interface.
But that is just the start, of course. Whether LiveJournal starts to grow again or stays in the land of tinkering remains to be seen. But I very much doubt its future prospects if it chooses the latter.
There is little use to the addition of ads to new accounts if no one signs up to them...
In light of the subject, what would you, as a user, like to see changed or added to LiveJournal (as in, a proper step, not tinkering)? And what would you like LiveJournal to evolve towards? In case you are not on LiveJournal and you have read this far, what would make you join up?
phantas(tick) Ponderings Post.Today's theme? Well, LiveJournal itself!
Following the recent hectic events (meriting the reaching of the 5000 maximum mark of comments), I wrote a (long) position note on nothing to do with LJ on which I finished with the remark:
PS: As a side note, I think LiveJournal is beginning to show its age and is somewhat failing to keep up with current trends and paradigms and that will ultimately be where as a business model it may fail, not on having or not ads on non-paying accounts.
You probably didn't reach that far...
If you are reading this, chances are you have a LiveJournal account (or like reading my ramblings because you're a friend of mine). Chances are you have had that account for something like 3-5 years. Furthermore, either you got one on its early days or you've been dragged here by some friend.
LiveJournal is a great concept. It was social networking before the catch expression Web 2.0 was even invented. Furthermore, it's robust. But it's frozen as a product and it's frozen as a business medium. It's no longer news and it's being outrun by newer, AJAX sparkling sites. To put it blankly, it is not growing. A comment expanding feature and the addition of an icon to custom groups is not progress, it's tinkering. Re-writing policy guidelines is tinkering, even with all the ensuing controversy. Streamlining and simplifying the registration process is... tinkering and, besides, will not be of much use if new users are not being called in to the product in the first place!
There's a certain irony with the last one. One of the main points surrounding last week's war concerned new users and it was argued that it was of little concern to old users. The irony? LiveJournal is so not a news item these days that almost the sole caller of new users are, in fact, the old ones.
There is nothing wrong with a business model where the core strategy to call new users is through acquaintance to present users. The entire Web 2.0 concept sits on that! As a side note, there is nothing wrong with the new features, they are great features, except for the fact that they are... tinkering. The problem with that strategy is that it relies completely on keeping the old users. And with new darlings such as Twitter and Facebook (and even, dare I say it, MySpace), it will not take much for those users to start migrating to other platforms of preference. This is worsen by the fact that not only does the product need to hold on to the old users to get new users, it needs to keep a regular inflow of the latter ones in order for it not to die out.
The day Blogger decides to add privacy capabilities through registered users or Facebook (or some other social networking company) vamps out its notes feature into more of a blog, is the day LiveJournal looses its competitive advantage. Consolidated view, aka the Friends page, is but a collection of feeds, well... consolidated and presented in a pleasant way. And the thread feature is but a step away.
I do not think LiveJournal should turn into yet another Web 2.0 social networking thing; there are plenty of those around already and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years from now we see a sort of a mini dot com look-alike crash over Web 2.0. It will be nowhere near as big a crash as the one in 2000/2001 because of two factors.
One, the economic cycle as today's recession overlaps with still early stages of the boom and recessions typically run at around one each ten years. Two, there being nothing associated with it as big an investment as the networking infrastructure (at least I don't see one) nor such a strong inflow of revenues. Certainly the music and other media industry (see SXSW) and relay of news and information is seeing quite a revolution. And then there's the "connected everywhere" wave: say, for example, Perkin's $100 million venture fund launched at the end of the Apple's March 6th announcement of iPhone's SDK. But in terms of investment, it looks more like a recycling of investments than the creation of new ones.
But returning to the subject at hand: why does LJ need to grow, if it's a good, robust product that does what current users want? Google search engine has hardly changed, after all. But, of course, Google has evolved much beyond just being a company that provides a free search engine in exchange for adds. And LJ was a good product years ago but is now showing its age.
From the top of my mind, I can immediately name three crucial points why. One, its users interaction only crudely covers all the new ways users want to communicate with each other (you have to know your HTML on the comments, if you want anything other than plain text). Two, a users page is completely inflexible save for colour combination and the like. Certainly, it is highly flexible in theory but that, besides a reasonable level of CSS/HTML hacking, requires learning the completely new language and framework that is S2. Have I mentioned BML? Third, there is no other way to access the highly popular Friends page other than through its web page. Unless they have changed anything since I last checked, there is not a single way of accessing friends entries through the API. I found that the hard way.
To make matters even worst, LiveJournal's architecture is so complex and ingrained that changing any of the two last points requires a substantial re-writing not to mention completely breaking users pages, and the only thing that can be done for the first point, before bumping into the same problems, is adding bells and whistles to the comments interface.
But that is just the start, of course. Whether LiveJournal starts to grow again or stays in the land of tinkering remains to be seen. But I very much doubt its future prospects if it chooses the latter.
There is little use to the addition of ads to new accounts if no one signs up to them...
In light of the subject, what would you, as a user, like to see changed or added to LiveJournal (as in, a proper step, not tinkering)? And what would you like LiveJournal to evolve towards? In case you are not on LiveJournal and you have read this far, what would make you join up?
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-24 06:49 pm (UTC)I want a clear separation of content, structure and presentation so I can filter out noise / create pretty stuff.
I want places which are robust against governmental or commercial censorship or content restriction. I want places that allow blogging from people whose voices are silenced for any reason, political, geographic or financial (there is some interesting stuff happening in this area) I want places that don't lose data.
I'm on LJ because this is where bi community friends went and I was eventually presuaded to get an account to read locked posts. I don't think I would much miss its demise.