State of the Goat 2006
Happy New Year everyone! We hope you all had a fun time ringing in 2006. At the beginning of a new year, it's nice to reflect on what we accomplished during the past one.
New features added in 2005:
* My LJ
* Invite A Friend
* Userpic add-on that increases the limit to 100
* Storage space add-on of 10 GB
* FAQ search tool
* Mp3 encoding for voice posts
* New S2 styles: Smoove, A Novel Conundrum, 3 Column Style, Tranquility II, Flexible Squares, Nebula, Dear Diary, Quite Lickable, Bloggish, Gradient Strip, Cuteness Attack
* In-page comment management
* LifeBlog support
* Windows XP client for ScrapBook that integrates with Explorer
* Tags support
* We created OpenID to allow commenting between LiveJournal clones, Six Apart's other products TypePad and MovableType, and it is now also being included in other products as well
* S2 quick reply
* New S2 editor, thanks to night_watch and Google's Summer of Code
* Timezone support to S2 comment pages
* Added fields in your userinfo for Skype and Google Talk. Paid members can also voice post via Gizmo.
* ScrapBook feature improvements
Schools Feature
With the help of all of you, we launched our schools feature last fall. In June, Brad asked you to submit your school information so he could begin compiling a list. We began with less than 10,000 schools, but as soon as we launched the feature you submitted your schools in droves. Now we're approaching 100,000 schools, from elementary schools to universities and beyond! Huge thanks to burr86 who took on the task of coordinating our schools volunteers who check your submissions before adding them to the Schools Directory. What started as a team of 10 volunteers has grown to about 60, and they've approved schools in 160+ countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe. Thanks everyone!
Other 2005 highlights include:
* LiveJournal was acquired by Six Apart and moved from Portland to Six Apart's San Francisco offices
* There were 5 winners in the 2nd Ever Style Contest
* In June we had a 24 hour permanent account sale
* New LJ communities were introduced, including feedback, lj_promote lj_spotlight and frank's journal was revived
* We printed a Frank mosaic poster to celebrate our 8 millionth account, and grew to over 9 million before the year ended
* We launched automatic payments to make it easier for you to renew your paid account
* You loved it when we increased free users to 6 userpics, and paid accounts to 1 GB of storage space
* Hoodies!
* Scores of you took advantage of the Give More promotion
Data Center Move
In November the systems and engineering departments pulled off the remarkable task of moving LJ's server infrastructure from Seattle to a new location in San Francisco. It was a great team effort and all of our users were very understanding while we worked through the bumps. Our servers are now located in a state-of-the-art facility with more room to grow, which gives us the ability to offer more features to users such as our recent upgrades in userpics and storage space. Read all about the most crucial night of the move on our LJ Move Blog.
Employees
2005 brought unprecedented growth on the LiveJournal team; we've more than doubled our full time staff. It started in March when kevink joined the team; in June veroz and revmischa began as interns and are now both official employees; ljkrissy, technopatra and coffeechica came on board in July; in November henrylyne, jtrevino and crucially joined the engineering team as we bid a fond farewell to mahlon. Please welcome our most recent employees, arie (support) and zhizhu (engineering).
Plans for 2006
In the coming year, we'll be focusing a lot on ScrapBook, improved search and some more fun things that you'll have to stick around to see!
New features added in 2005:
* My LJ
* Invite A Friend
* Userpic add-on that increases the limit to 100
* Storage space add-on of 10 GB
* FAQ search tool
* Mp3 encoding for voice posts
* New S2 styles: Smoove, A Novel Conundrum, 3 Column Style, Tranquility II, Flexible Squares, Nebula, Dear Diary, Quite Lickable, Bloggish, Gradient Strip, Cuteness Attack
* In-page comment management
* LifeBlog support
* Windows XP client for ScrapBook that integrates with Explorer
* Tags support
* We created OpenID to allow commenting between LiveJournal clones, Six Apart's other products TypePad and MovableType, and it is now also being included in other products as well
* S2 quick reply
* New S2 editor, thanks to night_watch and Google's Summer of Code
* Timezone support to S2 comment pages
* Added fields in your userinfo for Skype and Google Talk. Paid members can also voice post via Gizmo.
* ScrapBook feature improvements
Schools Feature
With the help of all of you, we launched our schools feature last fall. In June, Brad asked you to submit your school information so he could begin compiling a list. We began with less than 10,000 schools, but as soon as we launched the feature you submitted your schools in droves. Now we're approaching 100,000 schools, from elementary schools to universities and beyond! Huge thanks to burr86 who took on the task of coordinating our schools volunteers who check your submissions before adding them to the Schools Directory. What started as a team of 10 volunteers has grown to about 60, and they've approved schools in 160+ countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe. Thanks everyone!
Other 2005 highlights include:
* LiveJournal was acquired by Six Apart and moved from Portland to Six Apart's San Francisco offices
* There were 5 winners in the 2nd Ever Style Contest
* In June we had a 24 hour permanent account sale
* New LJ communities were introduced, including feedback, lj_promote lj_spotlight and frank's journal was revived
* We printed a Frank mosaic poster to celebrate our 8 millionth account, and grew to over 9 million before the year ended
* We launched automatic payments to make it easier for you to renew your paid account
* You loved it when we increased free users to 6 userpics, and paid accounts to 1 GB of storage space
* Hoodies!
* Scores of you took advantage of the Give More promotion
Data Center Move
In November the systems and engineering departments pulled off the remarkable task of moving LJ's server infrastructure from Seattle to a new location in San Francisco. It was a great team effort and all of our users were very understanding while we worked through the bumps. Our servers are now located in a state-of-the-art facility with more room to grow, which gives us the ability to offer more features to users such as our recent upgrades in userpics and storage space. Read all about the most crucial night of the move on our LJ Move Blog.
Employees
2005 brought unprecedented growth on the LiveJournal team; we've more than doubled our full time staff. It started in March when kevink joined the team; in June veroz and revmischa began as interns and are now both official employees; ljkrissy, technopatra and coffeechica came on board in July; in November henrylyne, jtrevino and crucially joined the engineering team as we bid a fond farewell to mahlon. Please welcome our most recent employees, arie (support) and zhizhu (engineering).
Plans for 2006
In the coming year, we'll be focusing a lot on ScrapBook, improved search and some more fun things that you'll have to stick around to see!