Attention span of... Oo! Fluffy bears!
Deep sigh... This is what happens when a private organisation develops into a company. Amateurs want to be praised. Professionals want to be paid.
In order to be praised, you need to listen very carefully to your users[1] and give them what they need (which may not necessarily be what they want).
But there's many, many ways in which you can get people to pay you, and you only need to make your service good enough to prevent a mass exodus. If you've been typing loads of stuff into LJ that you really care about, then Six Apart has you by the unmentionables. It's not for nothing that there aren't any good ways to export your data from LiveJournal intact.
Reading through all the communications that the LJ staff has blessed us with lately, the remarks about "the community we (as in Six Apart) wish to build", the promises that don't actually promise anything, the fwuffy bears that have replaced the important news on the front page so as not to disturb the influx of users, I think that the Six Apart people are trying to groom the userbase into a group that their most valued customers would value as willing targets for market research and advertising. As a group like Six Apart, you can make a mint off a thirteen million userbase.
As I said, amateurs want to be praised. Professionals just want to be paid.
My only advice is: be prepared to leave. By whatever means you can, back up the data from your pages. If that means cut-and-pasting it from your webbrowser, then so be it. Because Six Apart can snuff it out at their whim. They already did it once, and they haven't promised not to do it again in the future.
Well, I think this sorry business has run its course. This journal is going to "read-only" mode - there won't be any more entries that I care about. I will post links to whatever I replace it with. I don't know what it'll be, except that I'm certain that it will be on one of my computers.
LFR: http://news.livejournal.com/100060.html?thread=52551388#t52551388
[1] I'm using the word "users" here quite deliberately because users are not necessarily customers.
In order to be praised, you need to listen very carefully to your users[1] and give them what they need (which may not necessarily be what they want).
But there's many, many ways in which you can get people to pay you, and you only need to make your service good enough to prevent a mass exodus. If you've been typing loads of stuff into LJ that you really care about, then Six Apart has you by the unmentionables. It's not for nothing that there aren't any good ways to export your data from LiveJournal intact.
Reading through all the communications that the LJ staff has blessed us with lately, the remarks about "the community we (as in Six Apart) wish to build", the promises that don't actually promise anything, the fwuffy bears that have replaced the important news on the front page so as not to disturb the influx of users, I think that the Six Apart people are trying to groom the userbase into a group that their most valued customers would value as willing targets for market research and advertising. As a group like Six Apart, you can make a mint off a thirteen million userbase.
As I said, amateurs want to be praised. Professionals just want to be paid.
My only advice is: be prepared to leave. By whatever means you can, back up the data from your pages. If that means cut-and-pasting it from your webbrowser, then so be it. Because Six Apart can snuff it out at their whim. They already did it once, and they haven't promised not to do it again in the future.
Well, I think this sorry business has run its course. This journal is going to "read-only" mode - there won't be any more entries that I care about. I will post links to whatever I replace it with. I don't know what it'll be, except that I'm certain that it will be on one of my computers.
LFR: http://news.livejournal.com/100060.html?thread=52551388#t52551388
[1] I'm using the word "users" here quite deliberately because users are not necessarily customers.