As goes Freevote, so goes LiveJournal...

[insomnia]

One of the lesser-known tales in the whole mythological, selectively PR'ed history of LiveJournal/SixApart is the story of Freevote.com.

(Don't bother looking for Freevote online... it doesn't exist anymore.)

Freevote.com was, as Brad Fitzpatrick describes it, "my first web project back in like 1998 . . . where I learned so much about Perl,

Comments

[keshaphim]

HA!rodneyorpheus predicted this when LJ was sold to SixApart.

[insomnia]

So did I, actually. There were already moves towards it before the sale to 6A.

[keshaphim]

I believe you. I just didn't have the pleasure of your LJ acquaintance back then. :D

[shawnwellborne]

Rodneyorpheus predicted this when LJ was sold to SixApart. . . . Is SixApart still making the LJ source available.

[sebab]

Is SixApart still making the LJ source available? Just wondering, not that I personally could do much about it.

[insomnia]

The old source is still available, but more and more of the new code isn't being open sourced. As a result, it is harder (and sometimes impossible) for LiveJournal code-based sites to add new features, styles, etc.

Links to the code and to the 3rd party client tools have been buried recently, though you can find the links if you dig deeply enough into the site. (Good luck, new users!)

[sebab]

Arguably, phone posts, the control strip, new styles, the new posting interface, and other design and interface changes are the bulk of the major changes that have been released recently. Pretty much all of this is unavailable in the code base, from what I've seen. Also unavailable are much of the results of the translation project, which means that LJ Code is far less usable overseas than it really should be... and overseas sites are perhaps the biggest potential audience for LJ Code.

As for styles, it definitely interferes with new lj-code sites when many of the latest styles are proprietary to SixApart.

[keshaphim]

That needs to be a quote. GOOD ONE.

[keshaphim]

*snort*
*puts on some Snog - Corporate Slave*

[pope_guilty]

That wasn't the eFront network, run by Sam Jain, was it? Lowtax over at SomethingAwful went through something almost identical to that back in the day.

[insomnia]

It's been so long, that I don't even remember who it was. That said, there were several companies that did this, and went belly-up, taking entire sites/services/communities with them.

[ratkrycek]

I remember those days.

Seems one of the few that has lasted is Yahoo, and they did some of the same things.

Wow

[mike_pett]

Dude I was just thinking that this was a slippery slope and that I had better create some real world equivalent of these relationships quick or I could totally count on losing you all soon.

Sad this.

M