LiveJournal
Encyclopedia
LiveJournal is a virtual community
where Internet
users can keep a blog
, journal
or diary
. LiveJournal is also the name of the free
and open source server
software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community.
LiveJournal was started on April 15, 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 that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP
in 2007, but continued to develop the site by the San Francisco-based company LiveJournal, Inc. In January 2009 LiveJournal laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia.
(with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can "friend" the other without reciprocation. On LiveJournal, "friend" is also used as a verb to describe listing someone as a friend.
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 (friends list, often shortened to 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.
and MySpace
, hides a post from the general public so that only those on the user's friends list can read it. Some users keep all their posts friends-only (except for a single post explaining that the journal is friends-only). LiveJournal also allows users to create custom user groups within their group of friends to further restrict who can read any particular post, and to allow easy reading of subsets of a user's friends list.
LiveJournal additionally has a "private" security option which allows users to make a post that only the poster can read, thus making their LiveJournal a private diary rather than a blog. It is also possible to choose a default security setting for one's journal, so that all entries are posted at that security level by default even if one forgets to alter the security setting at the time of posting.
Users may restrict who can comment on their posts in addition to who has the ability to read their posts. Comments on a given entry may be allowed from anyone who can read the entry or restricted. Commenting may be restricted by disabling commenting altogether or by screening comments. Screened comments are visible only to the original posters until the journal owner approves the comment. These restrictions can be applied to just anonymous users, users who aren't listed as a friend, or everyone. The IP address of commenters can be logged as well if the journal owner wishes to enable it.
An option allows users to hide their 'friend of' list from public view, but leaves the list visible to the user. In this case, only the friends list is shown. When 'friend of' is allowed, journal accounts who have friended the user and who are also friended are listed in neither 'friend of' nor 'friend', but rather a third category, 'mutual friends'. This was eventually made a separate option, like the 'friend of' list, and reworded so that the lists would have to be selected to include them in a profile, rather than to select an option to remove them.
LiveJournal lists that users can hide communities from their profile page by not friending them (friended communities are 'watched') and by either banning the community from posting in their journal (which has no effect since they cannot anyway, but does remove them from the 'member of' list) or by removing the 'friend of' list, which removes the 'member of' list in addition to the 'friend of' list.
LiveJournal allows paid account users to change privacy settings on past entries in bulk. Basic and plus accounts do not have an official web-based method, and normally must manually change such settings one by one; some third party clients, such as Livejournal Visibility Changer, provide this functionality for non-Paid users.
-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 or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts). They can also screen various types of comments before they are displayed, or disable commenting entirely. Users can also have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address.
In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group journals, dubbed "communities" (frequently abbreviated as comms). Anyone who joins a community can make posts to it as they would on a regular journal; communities also have "maintainers", ordinary users who run the community and oversee membership and moderation.
Some areas of LiveJournal rely heavily on user contributions and volunteer efforts. 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 running down due to a perceived lack of involvement from the LiveJournal administration.
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. 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.
In some cases legal and administrative concerns have led LiveJournal to prohibit some people from volunteering.
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. LiveJournal is the largest online community on the Runet
, with about 45% of all entries in the Russian blogosphere. According to Alexa Internet
50% of LiveJournal's audience is located in Russia. The following are the fifteen countries LiveJournal has the most users in and the number of users as of May 22, 2010 (based on the information listed by the users):
This is the gender breakdown :
These figures only include accounts where the information is public.
In the end of January 2009, Oh No They Didn't! was the first LiveJournal to surpass 16,777,216 comments (224), effectively breaking LiveJournal's previously undocumented limit on comments. This resulted in almost a week of downtime for the community, while LiveJournal worked to fix the issue.
In April 2010, the Oh No They Didn't community was moved to its own database cluster to improve site performance for all users, due to its size and the amount of traffic it was receiving.
. 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 Voice Post service are informed "Frank the Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly.
A weekly comic about Frank, written and drawn by cartoonist Ryan Estrada, is updated every Thursday on the "Frank: The Comic Strip" community on LiveJournal. As of July 2009 the community has roughly 8,000 members, and is watched by more than 7,000 LiveJournal users.
Beginning at the end of January 2010, LiveJournal's weekly news posts included references to Frank's life, becoming works of short fiction at the end of February. These pieces are often tied to weekly virtual gift promotions, where commenters that meet a certain criteria will receive a free v-gift sent by Frank.
. This curbing of membership was necessitated by a rate of growth faster than the server architecture could handle. New users were required to either obtain an invite code from an existing user or buy a paid account (which reverted to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system serendipitously reduced abuse on the site 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.
Elimination of the invite code system was met with mixed feelings and some opposition. LiveJournal's management pointed out that the invite code system was always intended to be temporary.
friendships where a user has "friended" someone who friended them. A friends list may represent something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection or a puzzle.
The difference between online and real-world friendships is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. LiveJournal friendships are not necessarily mutual; any user can befriend or "defriend" any other user at any time.
In the Russian LiveJournal community, the word френд ("friend", an English borrowing) is often used to describe this relationship instead of the native Russian word "друг" that translates to "friend".
The Dreamwidth
code fork of LiveJournal has split the 'friend' concept into its two component pieces of subscription and access.
. 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 Prevention Team and processes to handle claims about violations of the Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the law
, and other issues.
If the Abuse Prevention Team determines that a violation has occurred, the user will be either required to remove the infringing material (as in the case of copyright violations); the journal will be suspended until such time as the material can be removed (e.g., posting of home addresses or other various contact information of another); or, in cases of severe or multiple violations, the journal will be suspended (e.g., account hijacking, multiple instances of copyright violation, child pornography). The offending user is notified by email of any journal suspension or, if any offending material must be removed, the user is given a deadline for its removal. When a journal is suspended, it effectively removes from sight everything the user has written on LiveJournal, including comments in other people's journals; however, the user is able to download the material while suspended. Those suspended users who have paid for LiveJournal's service do not have payments refunded.
A small controversy arose in November 2004 when a policy document used by the Abuse Prevention Team was leaked to a group of its critics before it was due to be released. The policy document has since been officially released.
Another controversy arose when users complained after an unknown number of users were asked to remove default user pictures containing images of breast feeding that were considered inappropriate as they contained a view of nipples or areolae. The incident attracted the attention of breast feeding advocacy
groups such as Pro-Mom who publicized the issue to gain larger media awareness. LiveJournal responded by changing the FAQ on appropriate content for default user pictures. The current FAQ 111 says that nudity is not appropriate in default user pictures; the original FAQ 111 said that graphic sexual content was not appropriate. Breastfeeding pictures were not restricted by the original FAQ, and the current FAQ reflects the fact that they are only restricted from use as a default user picture. It should be noted that breastfeeding pictures are still allowed as user pictures that may be manually chosen while posting but may not be the default.
-side security vulnerability
. The hacker group responsible was later identified as "Bantown". Approximately 900,000 accounts were at risk.
This announcement was met with a whirlwind of controversy. Between April 2004 and January 2005, one of LiveJournal's Social Contract promises stated the site would, "Stay advertisement free." The Social Contract went on to say, "It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages."
Another ad-related controversy occurred in June 2006, when ads for Kpremium began installing malware
and triggering pop-up ads on Australian and Western European users' computers, against the LiveJournal ad guidelines. LiveJournal responded by removing the advertisement from the website and issuing an apology to its users.
In March 2008, LiveJournal discontinued the ability for new users to select the "basic" level of journal, which allowed for a minimal set of features with no advertising at no cost. However, in August of the same year, the company reversed the decision, reviving "basic" service as a manual, post-registration downgrade. However, the resumed basic service level is no longer ad-free: advertisements are displayed when readers who are not logged in to livejournal view postings on a basic account.
According to Six Apart chairman and chief executive Barak Berkowitz, "We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up". In a subsequent posting to the LiveJournal news community, he apologized, discussed some of the circumstances behind the suspensions, and indicated that the suspended journals would be reviewed and potentially brought back online. In particular, he noted that Livejournal's normal practice of reviewing suspensions and notifying suspended account holders had not been followed:
Most of the backlash was from fan fiction
writers whose communities and personal journals were among those suspended, seemingly because they listed interests such as "incest
" or "non-con" (short for non-consensual). Although these communities did not necessarily encourage illegal behavior, it has been reported that there was no further investigation into the content of these journals.
Beyond merely fan communities, many were initially upset that communities entirely unrelated to anything but the discussion, sometimes therapeutic and other times literary, of rape or child molestation were among those suspended.
On May 31, 2007, Berkowitz released a statement to the LiveJournal news community announcing that Six Apart was currently in the process of unsuspending about half of suspended journals. The journals being reinstated fell into fandom or fiction categories or were journals that were suspended for problems related only to the contents of their profiles. In an earlier interview with news.com, he had stated that he would be "shocked" if "more than a dozen" journals would be reinstated.
On July 19, 2007, Abe Hassan at LiveJournal released a statement clarifying LiveJournal's suspension policies. A further statement was made on August 7, 2007.
, Esther Dyson
, Lawrence Lessig
, and the original LiveJournal founder, Brad Fitzpatrick. SUP announced two other members would be appointed from the LiveJournal userbase, one Russian and one English speaking. The English speaking election was marred with accusations of ballot stuffing
, conflicts of interest, and multiple death threats. The developer who wrote the poll software running the election called the ballot stuffing plausible.
attacks in 2011. The first attack on March 30th took down the site for several hours. The attack is reported to be the largest DDoS attack against LiveJournal since the site's creation. A second attack continued through April 4th and 5th, causing service disruption for some users.
A third attack in July caused the site to be unavailable for several hours at a time for a week.
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. In August 2007, Fitzpatrick left to work for Google
.
journalist
Om Malik
in his blog, on January 4, 2005. 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. A few hours later, Fitzpatrick confirmed the sale, and insisted the site's core principles would not be discarded by the new ownership. 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.
Fitzpatrick's supporters offered rebuttals to many of these arguments. 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
.
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."
Fitzpatrick left Six Apart in August 2007 and is no longer involved in the development of LiveJournal. However, Fitzpatrick continued to serve on the Advisory Board of LiveJournal, Inc until it was retired in June 2010.
for blogging in Russia, and the community boasts something close to 700,000 Russian LiveJournals, perhaps 300,000 of them active.
Six Apart licenced the Livejournal brand to the Russian company SUP
in August 2006. The deal was brokered with the assistance of founder Brad Fitzpatrick. However, expatriated Russians have expressed concerns, citing links between the company and state security. Some have also worried that SUP's purchasing of the community was less to make a profit and more to curtail or even dissolve the strong independent Russian blogging community, silencing dissent the government found inconvenient. These concerns started with the licensing deal, and have grown with the announcement of the sale.
LiveJournal was sold to SUP in December 2007.
Anton Nossik, an advisor to SUP
, has not reacted favourably to criticism by site users. In an interview given in March 2008, he accused LiveJournal users of "trying to scare and blackmail us, threatening to destroy our business," and stated that a large class of users have as their only purpose bringing harm to LiveJournal and its founders; "their goal is to criticize, destablilize and ruin our reputation." In the interview, he predicted that his likely reaction to such pressure would be to retaliate against the users rather than bowing to their pressure.
than LiveJournal's, making them attractive to users who have become disenchanted with LiveJournal's rules and wish to move their journals to other hosts.
Virtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...
where Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
users can keep a blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
, journal
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...
or diary
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...
. LiveJournal is also the name of the free
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
and open source server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community.
LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick
Brad Fitzpatrick
Bradley Joseph "Brad" Fitzpatrick , is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached....
as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart
Six Apart
Six Apart Ltd., sometimes abbreviated 6A, is a software company known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting service, and Vox. The company also is the former owner of LiveJournal. Six Apart is headquartered in Tokyo and is planning to open a new, U.S.-based office in New York...
purchased Danga Interactive
Danga Interactive
Danga Interactive is a software and Internet company most widely known for its LiveJournal service. The company's slogan is "We make cool stuff." The company was founded under the name Bradfitz, Inc., on August 27, 1999, by Brad Fitzpatrick, who also created LiveJournal...
, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP
SUP Fabrik
SUP is an international online media company, founded in Moscow in mid-2006 by Andrew Paulson and Alexander Mamut...
in 2007, but continued to develop the site by the San Francisco-based company LiveJournal, Inc. In January 2009 LiveJournal laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia.
Features
- Each journal entry has its own web page, which includes the comments left by other users. In addition, each user has a journal page, which shows all of his or her most recent journal entries, along with links to the comment pages.
- The most distinctive feature of LiveJournal is the "friends list," which gives the site a strong social aspect in addition to the blogBlogA blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
services. The friends list provides various syndicationWeb syndicationWeb syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary or update of the website's recently added content...
and privacy services as described below. Each user has a friends page, which collects the most recent journal entries of the people on his or her friends list. - LiveJournal allows users to customize their accounts in several ways. The S2 programming languageS2 programming languageS2 is an object-oriented programming language developed in the late 1990s by Brad Fitzpatrick, Martin "Mart" Atkins, and others for the online journaling service LiveJournal in order to allow users full control over the appearance of their pages...
allows journal templates to be modified by members. Users may upload graphical avatarAvatar (computing)In computing, an avatar is the graphical representation of the user or the user's alter ego or character. It may take either a three-dimensional form, as in games or virtual worlds, or a two-dimensional form as an icon in Internet forums and other online communities. It can also refer to a text...
s, or "userpics," which appear next to the username in prominent areas as it would on an Internet forumInternet forumAn Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
. Paid account holders are given full access to S2 management and more userpics, as well as other features. - Each user also has a "User Info" page, which contains a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources) and lists of friends, interests, communities and even schools which the user has attended in the past or is currently attending.
- LiveJournal also allows "voice posts" to their paid and sponsored users, where one can call into the system and record an entry.
- Currently LiveJournal has five account levels: basic (comprising approximately 95% of the network); plus (sponsored with more advertising); "early adopters" who were registered prior to 14 September 2000; paid and permanent. Permanent accounts are normally not available to the "average user;" there have been occasional sale days or special offers, but such sales are not guaranteed in the future. Prior to March 12, 2008, "basic" accounts were ad-free; in August, 2008, LiveJournal resumed new basic account creation but changed that account level to display ads to non-logged-in readers. Basic users also see advertising, but not on other "basic" journals.
Social networking
The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternaryQuaternary numeral system
Quaternary is the base- numeral system. It uses the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 to represent any real number.It shares with all fixed-radix numeral systems many properties, such as the ability to represent any real number with a canonical representation and the characteristics of the representations of...
(with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can "friend" the other without reciprocation. On LiveJournal, "friend" is also used as a verb to describe listing someone as a friend.
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 (friends list, often shortened to flist) will often include several communities and RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
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.
Privacy
LiveJournal provides an option intended to reduce the chances of search engines indexing a journal; however, the only way to make it completely impossible for such indexing to occur is to set the entry security to "friends only" or higher when first posting the entry. If an entry is first posted publicly, and then edited to reflect a higher security level, it may have already been indexed by a search engine in the time between the security edit. The popular "friends only" security option, which has since been adopted by XangaXanga
Xanga is a website that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, and social networking profiles. It is operated by Xanga.com, Inc., based in New York City.-Origins:...
and MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
, hides a post from the general public so that only those on the user's friends list can read it. Some users keep all their posts friends-only (except for a single post explaining that the journal is friends-only). LiveJournal also allows users to create custom user groups within their group of friends to further restrict who can read any particular post, and to allow easy reading of subsets of a user's friends list.
LiveJournal additionally has a "private" security option which allows users to make a post that only the poster can read, thus making their LiveJournal a private diary rather than a blog. It is also possible to choose a default security setting for one's journal, so that all entries are posted at that security level by default even if one forgets to alter the security setting at the time of posting.
Users may restrict who can comment on their posts in addition to who has the ability to read their posts. Comments on a given entry may be allowed from anyone who can read the entry or restricted. Commenting may be restricted by disabling commenting altogether or by screening comments. Screened comments are visible only to the original posters until the journal owner approves the comment. These restrictions can be applied to just anonymous users, users who aren't listed as a friend, or everyone. The IP address of commenters can be logged as well if the journal owner wishes to enable it.
An option allows users to hide their 'friend of' list from public view, but leaves the list visible to the user. In this case, only the friends list is shown. When 'friend of' is allowed, journal accounts who have friended the user and who are also friended are listed in neither 'friend of' nor 'friend', but rather a third category, 'mutual friends'. This was eventually made a separate option, like the 'friend of' list, and reworded so that the lists would have to be selected to include them in a profile, rather than to select an option to remove them.
LiveJournal lists that users can hide communities from their profile page by not friending them (friended communities are 'watched') and by either banning the community from posting in their journal (which has no effect since they cannot anyway, but does remove them from the 'member of' list) or by removing the 'friend of' list, which removes the 'member of' list in addition to the 'friend of' list.
LiveJournal allows paid account users to change privacy settings on past entries in bulk. Basic and plus accounts do not have an official web-based method, and normally must manually change such settings one by one; some third party clients, such as Livejournal Visibility Changer, provide this functionality for non-Paid users.
User interaction
As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries and create a message boardInternet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
-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 or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts). They can also screen various types of comments before they are displayed, or disable commenting entirely. Users can also have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address.
In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group journals, dubbed "communities" (frequently abbreviated as comms). Anyone who joins a community can make posts to it as they would on a regular journal; communities also have "maintainers", ordinary users who run the community and oversee membership and moderation.
Some areas of LiveJournal rely heavily on user contributions and volunteer efforts. 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 running down due to a perceived lack of involvement from the LiveJournal administration.
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. 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.
In some cases legal and administrative concerns have led LiveJournal to prohibit some people from volunteering.
Demographics
, 31,772,640 accounts exist on LiveJournal, with 1,959,750 listed as "active in some way." Of those users who provided their date of birth, the majority were in the 17-25 age group, with an exceptionally large group of 31-year-olds. Of those who specified a gender, five-eighths were female.Demographics by countries
| Top 15 countries | 8,673,909 | 100% | |
 United States |
4,895,360 | 56.43% | |
 Russia |
1,593,894 | 18.38% | |
 United Kingdom |
451,142 | 5.20% | |
 Canada |
436,384 | 5.03% | |
 Ukraine |
256,373 | 2.96% | |
 Singapore |
209,879 | 2.41% | |
 Australia |
205,400 | 2.37% | |
 Philippines |
125,922 | 1.45% | |
 Germany |
96,105 | 1.11% | |
 Brazil |
83,867 | 0.97% | |
 Japan |
76,106 | 0.88% | |
 India |
72,559 | 0.84% | |
 Belarus |
61,746 | 0.71% | |
 Finland |
56,714 | 0.65% | |
 Early Modern France |
52,458 | 0.60% |
Runet
Currently Internet access in Russia is available to businesses and home users in various forms, including dial-up, cable, DSL, FTTH, mobile, wireless and satellite...
, with about 45% of all entries in the Russian blogosphere. According to Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...
50% of LiveJournal's audience is located in Russia. The following are the fifteen countries LiveJournal has the most users in and the number of users as of May 22, 2010 (based on the information listed by the users):
Demographics by gender
| Female Female Female is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces non-mobile ova .- Defining characteristics :The ova are defined as the larger gametes in a heterogamous reproduction system, while the smaller, usually motile gamete, the spermatozoon, is produced by the male... |
6,073,901 | 62.7% | |
| Male Male Male refers to the biological sex of an organism, or part of an organism, which produces small mobile gametes, called spermatozoa. Each spermatozoon can fuse with a larger female gamete or ovum, in the process of fertilization... |
3,615,015 | 37.3% | |
| Unspecified | 4,191,634 |
These figures only include accounts where the information is public.
Oh No They Didn't!
Oh No They Didn't, also known as ONTD, is the most popular community on LiveJournal, with over 100,000 members. The community is centered around celebrity gossip, and most of its posts are taken and sourced from other gossip blogs.In the end of January 2009, Oh No They Didn't! was the first LiveJournal to surpass 16,777,216 comments (224), effectively breaking LiveJournal's previously undocumented limit on comments. This resulted in almost a week of downtime for the community, while LiveJournal worked to fix the issue.
In April 2010, the Oh No They Didn't community was moved to its own database cluster to improve site performance for all users, due to its size and the amount of traffic it was receiving.
Frank the Goat
Frank the Goat is LiveJournal's mascotMascot
The term mascot – defined as a term for any person, animal, or object thought to bring luck – colloquially includes anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name...
. 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 Voice Post service are informed "Frank the Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly.
A weekly comic about Frank, written and drawn by cartoonist Ryan Estrada, is updated every Thursday on the "Frank: The Comic Strip" community on LiveJournal. As of July 2009 the community has roughly 8,000 members, and is watched by more than 7,000 LiveJournal users.
Beginning at the end of January 2010, LiveJournal's weekly news posts included references to Frank's life, becoming works of short fiction at the end of February. These pieces are often tied to weekly virtual gift promotions, where commenters that meet a certain criteria will receive a free v-gift sent by Frank.
Invite system
From September 2, 2001, until December 12, 2003, the growth of LiveJournal was checked by an "invite code" systemInvitation system
An invitation system is a method of joining an organization, such as a club or a website. In regular society, it refers to any system whereby new members are chosen; they cannot simply apply...
. This curbing of membership was necessitated by a rate of growth faster than the server architecture could handle. New users were required to either obtain an invite code from an existing user or buy a paid account (which reverted to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system serendipitously reduced abuse on the site 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.
Elimination of the invite code system was met with mixed feelings and some opposition. LiveJournal's management pointed out that the invite code system was always intended to be temporary.
The word "friend"
The dual usage of "friend" as those whose journals one reads, and those one trusts to read one's own journal, has been criticized for being at odds with everyday use of the term. The individual users on a user's friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships and general interests, as well as courtesyCourtesy
Courtesy comes from old french 'courteis' is gentle politeness and courtly manners. In the Middle Ages in Europe, the behaviour expected of the gentry was compiled in courtesy books...
friendships where a user has "friended" someone who friended them. A friends list may represent something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection or a puzzle.
The difference between online and real-world friendships is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. LiveJournal friendships are not necessarily mutual; any user can befriend or "defriend" any other user at any time.
In the Russian LiveJournal community, the word френд ("friend", an English borrowing) is often used to describe this relationship instead of the native Russian word "друг" that translates to "friend".
The Dreamwidth
Dreamwidth
Dreamwidth is an online journal service based on the LiveJournal code. It is a code fork of the original service, set up by ex-LiveJournal staff Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, born out of a desire for a new community based on open access, transparency, freedom and respect.Dreamwidth was announced...
code fork of LiveJournal has split the 'friend' concept into its two component pieces of subscription and access.
Abuse Prevention 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 ServiceTerms of Service
Terms of service are rules which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service. Unless in violation of consumer protection laws, such terms are usually legally binding...
. The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as spamming, copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
violation, harassment
Harassment
Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behaviour intended to disturb or upset, and it is characteristically repetitive. In the legal sense, it is intentional behaviour which is found threatening or disturbing...
, etc. LiveJournal created an Abuse Prevention Team and processes to handle claims about violations of the Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
, and other issues.
If the Abuse Prevention Team determines that a violation has occurred, the user will be either required to remove the infringing material (as in the case of copyright violations); the journal will be suspended until such time as the material can be removed (e.g., posting of home addresses or other various contact information of another); or, in cases of severe or multiple violations, the journal will be suspended (e.g., account hijacking, multiple instances of copyright violation, child pornography). The offending user is notified by email of any journal suspension or, if any offending material must be removed, the user is given a deadline for its removal. When a journal is suspended, it effectively removes from sight everything the user has written on LiveJournal, including comments in other people's journals; however, the user is able to download the material while suspended. Those suspended users who have paid for LiveJournal's service do not have payments refunded.
A small controversy arose in November 2004 when a policy document used by the Abuse Prevention Team was leaked to a group of its critics before it was due to be released. The policy document has since been officially released.
Another controversy arose when users complained after an unknown number of users were asked to remove default user pictures containing images of breast feeding that were considered inappropriate as they contained a view of nipples or areolae. The incident attracted the attention of breast feeding advocacy
Lactivism
Lactivism is a term used to describe the advocacy of breastfeeding. Supporters, referred to as "lactivists", seek to promote the health benefits of breastfeeding over formula-feeding and to ensure...
groups such as Pro-Mom who publicized the issue to gain larger media awareness. LiveJournal responded by changing the FAQ on appropriate content for default user pictures. The current FAQ 111 says that nudity is not appropriate in default user pictures; the original FAQ 111 said that graphic sexual content was not appropriate. Breastfeeding pictures were not restricted by the original FAQ, and the current FAQ reflects the fact that they are only restricted from use as a default user picture. It should be noted that breastfeeding pictures are still allowed as user pictures that may be manually chosen while posting but may not be the default.
Account vulnerabilities
In January 2006 the site had to make emergency changes to the way the site hosts user accounts due to a web browserWeb browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
-side security vulnerability
Vulnerability
Vulnerability refer to the susceptibility of a person, group, society, sex or system to physical or emotional injury or attack. The term can also refer to a person who lets their guard down, leaving themselves open to censure or criticism...
. The hacker group responsible was later identified as "Bantown". Approximately 900,000 accounts were at risk.
LiveJournal and advertisements
In April 2006, LiveJournal announced it was introducing a new user type that gave free users some of the features available to paid members in exchange for ad sponsorship. This user type was initially called Sponsored+, but was later renamed to Plus.This announcement was met with a whirlwind of controversy. Between April 2004 and January 2005, one of LiveJournal's Social Contract promises stated the site would, "Stay advertisement free." The Social Contract went on to say, "It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages."
Another ad-related controversy occurred in June 2006, when ads for Kpremium began installing malware
Malware
Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...
and triggering pop-up ads on Australian and Western European users' computers, against the LiveJournal ad guidelines. LiveJournal responded by removing the advertisement from the website and issuing an apology to its users.
In March 2008, LiveJournal discontinued the ability for new users to select the "basic" level of journal, which allowed for a minimal set of features with no advertising at no cost. However, in August of the same year, the company reversed the decision, reviving "basic" service as a manual, post-registration downgrade. However, the resumed basic service level is no longer ad-free: advertisements are displayed when readers who are not logged in to livejournal view postings on a basic account.
Account suspension controversy
In May 2007, LiveJournal suspended approximately 500 accounts and communities, causing what news.com referred to as a "revolt" from "thousands of LiveJournal customers", after a number of activist groups, including one named Warriors for Innocence, reported pedophilic material on its website.According to Six Apart chairman and chief executive Barak Berkowitz, "We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up". In a subsequent posting to the LiveJournal news community, he apologized, discussed some of the circumstances behind the suspensions, and indicated that the suspended journals would be reviewed and potentially brought back online. In particular, he noted that Livejournal's normal practice of reviewing suspensions and notifying suspended account holders had not been followed:
[T]hese journals were suspended for easily correctable problems[...] [T]his was not communicated to the journal or community owners at all.
[T]hese journals were taken down before review could be completed to avoid mistakes.
Most of the backlash was from fan fiction
Fan fiction
Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
writers whose communities and personal journals were among those suspended, seemingly because they listed interests such as "incest
Incest
Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...
" or "non-con" (short for non-consensual). Although these communities did not necessarily encourage illegal behavior, it has been reported that there was no further investigation into the content of these journals.
Beyond merely fan communities, many were initially upset that communities entirely unrelated to anything but the discussion, sometimes therapeutic and other times literary, of rape or child molestation were among those suspended.
On May 31, 2007, Berkowitz released a statement to the LiveJournal news community announcing that Six Apart was currently in the process of unsuspending about half of suspended journals. The journals being reinstated fell into fandom or fiction categories or were journals that were suspended for problems related only to the contents of their profiles. In an earlier interview with news.com, he had stated that he would be "shocked" if "more than a dozen" journals would be reinstated.
On July 19, 2007, Abe Hassan at LiveJournal released a statement clarifying LiveJournal's suspension policies. A further statement was made on August 7, 2007.
Advisory Board election
As previously announced, SUP, the latest owners of LiveJournal, decided to create an Advisory Board to help it make decisions. The first members were distinguished people in the areas of law and technology, Danah BoydDanah Boyd
danah boyd also known as Danah Michele Boyd, is an American social media researcher known for her public commentary on the use of social networking sites by youth...
, Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space...
, Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...
, and the original LiveJournal founder, Brad Fitzpatrick. SUP announced two other members would be appointed from the LiveJournal userbase, one Russian and one English speaking. The English speaking election was marred with accusations of ballot stuffing
Ballot stuffing
Ballot stuffing is the illegal act of one person submitting multiple ballots during a vote in which only one ballot per person is permitted. The name originates from the earliest days of this practice in which people literally did stuff more than one ballot in a ballot box at the same time...
, conflicts of interest, and multiple death threats. The developer who wrote the poll software running the election called the ballot stuffing plausible.
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
LiveJournal has been the victim of several DDoSDOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
attacks in 2011. The first attack on March 30th took down the site for several hours. The attack is reported to be the largest DDoS attack against LiveJournal since the site's creation. A second attack continued through April 4th and 5th, causing service disruption for some users.
A third attack in July caused the site to be unavailable for several hours at a time for a week.
Sale to Six Apart
LiveJournal's parent company, Danga Interactive, was initially formed and held entirely by Brad Fitzpatrick. However, as LiveJournal became more popular, Fitzpatrick was approached by multiple parties who wished to purchase it. 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 softwareFree software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
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. In August 2007, Fitzpatrick left to work for Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
.
Community reaction
Rumors of Danga's impending sale to Six Apart were first reported by Business 2.0Business 2.0
Business 2.0 was a monthly magazine publication founded by magazine entrepreneur Chris Anderson, Mark Gross, and journalist James Daly in order to chronicle the rise of the "New Economy"...
journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
Om Malik
Om Malik
Om Perkash Malik is an Indian-American web and technology writer. He is the founder of Giga Omni Media, Inc. and executive editor for technology blog GigaOM. He is also a host on a former Revision3 weekly web-business centric podcast, The GigaOm Show.- Personal life and education :Malik was born...
in his blog, on January 4, 2005. 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
Backup
In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form is back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup....
their journals to impact the site's performance. A few hours later, Fitzpatrick confirmed the sale, and insisted the site's core principles would not be discarded by the new ownership. 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.
Fitzpatrick's supporters offered rebuttals to many of these arguments. 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
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
.
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."
Fitzpatrick left Six Apart in August 2007 and is no longer involved in the development of LiveJournal. However, Fitzpatrick continued to serve on the Advisory Board of LiveJournal, Inc until it was retired in June 2010.
Sale to SUP
LiveJournal became extremely popular in Russia. The Russian translation of LiveJournal – ЖЖ (ZheZhe, which stands for Живой Журнал) – has become a genericized trademarkGenericized trademark
A genericized trademark is a trademark or brand name that has become the colloquial or generic description for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service, rather than as an indicator of source or affiliation as intended by the trademark's holder...
for blogging in Russia, and the community boasts something close to 700,000 Russian LiveJournals, perhaps 300,000 of them active.
Six Apart licenced the Livejournal brand to the Russian company SUP
SUP Fabrik
SUP is an international online media company, founded in Moscow in mid-2006 by Andrew Paulson and Alexander Mamut...
in August 2006. The deal was brokered with the assistance of founder Brad Fitzpatrick. However, expatriated Russians have expressed concerns, citing links between the company and state security. Some have also worried that SUP's purchasing of the community was less to make a profit and more to curtail or even dissolve the strong independent Russian blogging community, silencing dissent the government found inconvenient. These concerns started with the licensing deal, and have grown with the announcement of the sale.
LiveJournal was sold to SUP in December 2007.
Anton Nossik, an advisor to SUP
SUP Fabrik
SUP is an international online media company, founded in Moscow in mid-2006 by Andrew Paulson and Alexander Mamut...
, has not reacted favourably to criticism by site users. In an interview given in March 2008, he accused LiveJournal users of "trying to scare and blackmail us, threatening to destroy our business," and stated that a large class of users have as their only purpose bringing harm to LiveJournal and its founders; "their goal is to criticize, destablilize and ruin our reputation." In the interview, he predicted that his likely reaction to such pressure would be to retaliate against the users rather than bowing to their pressure.
Launch of LiveJournal Inc
Following SUP's acquisition of LiveJournal, SUP announced that the service would be run by LiveJournal Inc.; this newly launched company is based in San Francisco and continues to run the site under US law.Global expansion
Following LiveJournal's acquisition SUP identified three international markets (Singapore, the UK and India) which it hoped to support the services growth and seed new communities. LiveJournal recently launched new communities in India and has undertaken a reach-out programme with bloggers in Singapore. On June 8, 2011, it was announced that LiveJournal will launch local start-pages across South-East Asia and India catering to the large community the site has built here. It appointed local Singapore digital publisher Tickled Media to run the LiveJournal service in the region.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. These sites have very similar features and formats to LiveJournal itself. However, they often have different terms of serviceTerms of service
Terms of service are rules which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service. Unless in violation of consumer protection laws, such terms are usually legally binding...
than LiveJournal's, making them attractive to users who have become disenchanted with LiveJournal's rules and wish to move their journals to other hosts.
See also
- Comparison of sites using the LiveJournal codebaseComparison of sites using the LiveJournal codebaseThis is a comparison of sites publicly accessible on the internet known to be using the LiveJournal codebase.The LiveJournal web community is based on open source software for blogging and social networking, primarily written in Perl. Because of this, many other communities have been designed using...
- List of social networking websites
- Timeline of LiveJournalTimeline of LiveJournal-1999:* March 18, 1999 — LiveJournal starts...
External links
- LiveJournal.com
- LiveJournal code in a Subversion repository (GNU GPL licensed)
- LiveJournal Inc. Corporate site