Alas, LiveJournal
(originally published here: http://jwwest.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/alas-livejournal/)
Nearly 1o years ago, I opened a LiveJournal account. At the time, it was just starting to blossom into a hot, cutting edge web property. Brad Fitz was still squarely in charge, and I think they had just bought their second database server. My user id is 1581, most users today have user ids of six digits or above. Hell, at the time you couldn't have a username over nine characters and I ended up dropping the 'y' from my normal handle creating 'zerozephr'.
Needless to say, my account is still open and I loved LJ for numerous years. I would try blogging with another service or even tried my own software but inevitably I would end up integrating with LJ to cross-post, getting frustrated and eventually going back. The reason why is that they were the first to truly introduce the concept of a social network to blogging and web sharing. Many have done it better, but LJ was the first. Everyone I communicated with online used the service, so it was necessary for me to keep my account and update there for all my "friends" to see it.
I haven't really used LJ to blog since 2005, but I continue to keep my account open. I've often wondered in the past why the site still remains popular with certain groups of people, most notably slash fiction writers and furries. (I also hear that it's the most popular blogging platform in Russia.) But what really perplexes me are the holdouts that still use it in defiance of everything that's truly wrong with it: it hasn't changed in ten years.
If you have a winning product, it's not always necessary to change. However, LJ is so very outdated that the change required to stay current is enormous. At the time of its inception, there was no one doing the things it did with web sharing. Now there's almost too many choices, and many make it much easier than LJ does and in more interesting ways.
LiveJournal has not even really valued its members and supports. I can't even count the amount of drama raised over the years by the changing policies and heavy handed attempts at control by the numerous owners. But it was still simple and we continued to support it because of our friends list and communities. However even that's coming to an end.
The service is irrelevant now days: everyone does it better somewhere else. Even the design of most LJ sites are horrible; things of MySpace esque nightmare. The cool emotion and music tags which were so cool in 1999 look horribly dated and childish now. And the user icons! So cliche and overused that LJ can actually sell extra space for them for a premium rate, regardless that sites such as Facebook allow an unlimited number of possible user icons.
I'm not even broaching the subject of integration. LiveJournal is so steadfast in their refusal to innovate or change that no one supports them anymore. So it's even quickly becoming a thing of the past for me to use it as a secondary distribution for my writing. (Somehow, inexplicably, Posterous supports cross posting to LiveJournal so it may seem kind of ironic considering that this will end up there as well)
A friend of mine brought up an interesting observation the other day about his friends list. He noticed that his friends list had not updated in some time, and when it did it was aggregations from other sites. I've noticed this myself and while it makes me sad that eventually (soon) we'll see the death of the service from attrition, I can't help but feel a sense of relief. Sure, I have documented nearly 8 years of my life on LiveJournal including most of my turbulent early twenties, but as I've grown up I feel that either LJ needs to as well, or be lost forever as our generation logs off.
