Notes about SUP
Hi guys,
As you all probably know all "cyrillic-using" users of LJ were sold to Russia-based company called SUP. What that means - even if you are a pinguin living in Antarctika as long as you use cyrillic in your LJ posts the LJ services will be provided by SUP. Yes they claim that they will not go farther then just imaging userpics and creating ads but they give no guarantees. Speaking of ads - starting several days ago Plus Users who were branded as "SUP users" started recieving internal lj ads (like an ad to become paid user or use some of the paid functions like gifts) in russain from site "ads.sup.com" and there's no way to change it back to english even if you live outside of former-USSR.
That brings up another issue - there's no such thing as opt-in or opt-out button for SUP services. The SUP official position is that they just provide services and don't force you to use them so there's no need for opt-in/out function. So, in other words, if you don't like new changes you can always leave LJ. I believe that in a long run most users from Russia will benefit from SUP since LJ for users from Russia is like Facebook or MySpace for americans and 6Apart had no means of providing service.
I'm not that good in writing long posts so if you have questions leave them in comments area and i'll gladly answer them to the best of my abilities.
Just to summarize there are two HUGE problems with SUP services:
1) Not all users who use cyrillic speak russian or want to affiliate with Russian company in any means on forms.
2) Russian customer service doesn't know the definition of "customer centricity".
P.S. Very interesting post about shrinking LJ population. Keep in mind that 680,000 journals were sold to SUP for service. That makes it over 50% of users under SUP. Hence there's a huge possibility of breaking "cyrillic-using" population of LJ onto a separate server.
As you all probably know all "cyrillic-using" users of LJ were sold to Russia-based company called SUP. What that means - even if you are a pinguin living in Antarctika as long as you use cyrillic in your LJ posts the LJ services will be provided by SUP. Yes they claim that they will not go farther then just imaging userpics and creating ads but they give no guarantees. Speaking of ads - starting several days ago Plus Users who were branded as "SUP users" started recieving internal lj ads (like an ad to become paid user or use some of the paid functions like gifts) in russain from site "ads.sup.com" and there's no way to change it back to english even if you live outside of former-USSR.
That brings up another issue - there's no such thing as opt-in or opt-out button for SUP services. The SUP official position is that they just provide services and don't force you to use them so there's no need for opt-in/out function. So, in other words, if you don't like new changes you can always leave LJ. I believe that in a long run most users from Russia will benefit from SUP since LJ for users from Russia is like Facebook or MySpace for americans and 6Apart had no means of providing service.
I'm not that good in writing long posts so if you have questions leave them in comments area and i'll gladly answer them to the best of my abilities.
Just to summarize there are two HUGE problems with SUP services:
1) Not all users who use cyrillic speak russian or want to affiliate with Russian company in any means on forms.
2) Russian customer service doesn't know the definition of "customer centricity".
P.S. Very interesting post about shrinking LJ population. Keep in mind that 680,000 journals were sold to SUP for service. That makes it over 50% of users under SUP. Hence there's a huge possibility of breaking "cyrillic-using" population of LJ onto a separate server.