Correction and some Wired articles of interest

[foxfirefey]

anildash kindly corrects me on Vox having/not having communities in the future: "That being said, I'm not saying whether Vox will or won't have communities -- as far as I know, we haven't announced either way yet. My guess is we're going to just listen to the feedback people submit and judge by that, same as with everything else

Comments

[matgb]

From the Wired/Vox article:
at the same time, Movable Type, LiveJournal and TypePad are all very close to being profitable, too

I thought LJ was profitable at the point 6A bought Danga? Haave they run it down that much, did she miss speak, or another misquote?

[donutgirl]

I was going to say exactly this.

[ex_shattered767]

Holy carp.

[ex_uniquewo]

Back to being profitable then?

[ex_shattered767]

If that isn't a mistake, I'd like to know exactly what month LJ went from profitable to not profitable.

[foxfirefey]

They were, very slightly, if I remember correctly. But they were also forced to be very frugal. That's why memcached is so very, very efficient at serving large numbers of pages with few resources.

So on one hand, Six Apart's been able to put more resources and more employees onto LiveJournal. They upped the number of icons Basic users can have to six, they added tags, and tons of other changes.

Also--I don't know whether this figures into that statement or not--but LJ might also have the additional burden of paying back its own purchase price, as well. It didn't come free, so Six Apart would have to recoup the costs of acquiring it before it actually made them money.

[matgb]

Those are good points. Yes, of course, paying off the purchase price would be a requirement for any business, same as a start up loan.

And yeah, improvements from money make sense, and are palpable.

However, one of your listed improvements there I rate as a downgrade. Moving the datacentre from a fairly safe area to earthquake central makes no sense to me at all. They really ought to back it up and have multiple redundancy, same as Wordpress.com and Blogger have. It's not like they haven't got other offices.

[foxfirefey]

Neither I nor kunzite1 called them improvements; we called them changes, for the very reason that not everyone is going to consider all those changes improvements.

[ex_shattered767]

Exactly. I only used tags for the benefit of a few people on my flist who like them, my Basic accounts only have one uploaded icon in the first place, if any at all, nav strip is completely disabled, I've never even looked at My LJ, i turned contextual hovers off as soon as I realized they were on....

[matgb]

See, I love tags, when they came in, I went back and retagged all my old entries (I'd only been on LJ for about 6 months IIRC), the navstrip is cool and substantially improves the UI for new users (which is needed), same actually for the damned hovers (turned off also, but can see why they're there, and people did ask for them).

I use most of my loyalty pics, don't need to, but it's cool, and MyLJ has a sort of point but I rarely look at it these days.

Overall, I'd say the new stuff has been an improvement. Horizon most certainly is from a usability viewpoint, much better than xcolibur.

But ultimately, that you can usually turn stuff off is good. When they forget, well, that's just daft. I've changed my mind on the navstrip though; you should be able to switch it off completely if you want, I display mine to all because I use it to log in/out (avoiding the frontpage), but if oyu don't want to see it, I care not, it's not really part of my layout.

[ex_shattered767]

When nudge went live, it took a week before there was an opt-out. In that week, in spite of what LJ staff/support volunteers thought, the feature was abused and people were harassed.

LJTalk went live, and they openly admitted that they had thought about the option to turn it off in the profile page, but didn't think people would care much.

People wanted to turn CProd off, staff said people shouldn't be able to. Users came up with their own solution

[anildash]

I thought LJ was profitable at the point 6A bought Danga? Haave they run it down that much, did she miss speak, or another misquote?

I read this as a statement about the combination of all three. That doesn't mean any individual one of those services is or isn't profitable. Make sense?

[ex_uniquewo]

In a word, no.

[matgb]

To me, yes. You're applying marketing speak to make a non-statement in a way that makes it look like a statement ;-)

As a group, they're not profitable, but individual bits may or may not be, but you can't say. But, as already covered, it was profitable before on teh shoestring level, it couldn't afford the work you guys are putting in, so apples and oranges time really.