Countdown to destruction...
I'm kind of checking in and out of the news thread and a handful of people have brought up the question as to whether or not LJ made some kind of contractual deal with FB & Twitter to push users towards these other services. And now LJ is in a tight spot, legally speaking, because their customers are clearly screaming DO NOT WANT and packing up in
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Fact: All FB/Twitter requires from third parties (be it LJ or Yahoo!) is accurate branding of FB/Twitter & secure login procedures. End of story.
It's up to the third party to come up with creative integrations for sharing their content on the FB/Twitter platforms. The third party (LJ, in this case) is desperate to get their content out into the massive audience that FB/Twitter has. LJ already has FB/Twitter Connect so users can automatically ship their journal posts to the other platforms.
But what really drives engagement on LJ? Comments on posts between users. So why not create a way to put those comments automatically on FB/Twitter? Ta-da.
It's not that anyone's evil here. You just have to think like a businessperson & know what's going on in the industry. Everyone wants more action on their sites & sees that they can get that thru exposure on the massively big, popular social networks du jour.
And frankly, moving to another site doesn't "solve" anything unless, oh, that site is run by someone who's independently wealthy or it's a nonprofit & the site has no need of a modern money-making business model.
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Like most companies, LJ started off as a small project by a guy wanting to create some neat online features. Yahoo!, Facebook, Google, most everybody started off that way. And they, hey, we can make this into a real job! Cool. Except there are tradeoffs for both the ppl inside the company & for the users.
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What pisses me off is:
Privacy issues. Which, as you already know, are a huge deal for me right now regarding LJ, without having to add the involuntary crossposting/pingback worry on top of it. Also, getting someone's verbal promise not to spread the content of your LJ outside of your LJ doesn't work. Ask the last asshole who spouted off my private information to someone because they felt it would put them in an advantageous position. I know, the internet is never going to be private, but I would rather do without the default "publish this comment everywhere regardless of the revealing information it puts out there about the original poster" thing. Make it opt-in for each user to determine for their own journal, not default and determined by the commenter, and I will happily shut up about it and continue using LJ.
Also, on a somewhat lesser note, the complete radio silence from LJ regarding this outcry. There has to be SOMEONE, an intern or hell, even the janitor, who could be authorized to say "On behalf of Livejournal Corp., we hear your concerns and we are trying to address them as carefully as possible. Please be patient." They amended the original News post with a little blurb along those lines last night, some 20 hours after the panic, but otherwise, there's been no site-wide official statement saying anything about this.
(Seriously need more coffee...)
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That's going to be a bitter pill to swallow for those of us who have been with LJ for the better part of a decade and have permanent accounts, and really, permanent relationships that have been forged through LJ. However, permanent account users generate no revenue for the company, so we're already marginalized. We're as bad as free-users, except we get more perks because we paid up front for them pre-Six Apart. There's been 3 changes of ownership with the company in that time, and so what does LJ have to lose if the permanent account holders are pissed off about anything? Nothing. They lose a loyal member, but not a paying customer.
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Interaction keeps users on the site. The small number of permanent users interact with a far greater number of paid & even-better free users (who see ads). Websites thrive on engagement like that.
And that, again, is why they want to port comments over to FB/Twitter, so those vast audiences see LJ content & hopefully come join LJ too.
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I hope that's not coming across as flippant. Apparently I'm having problems with my tone on LJ today. I'm really actually curious to know.
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The longer a user is on your site, the more time you have to show them ads. Advertisements have always been & prob. always will be the #1 way for websites to make money.
Individual payments just haven't cut it. Most users hate paying for website services. They want newspapers, blogs, social networks, email, you name it, for free. There are extremely few services ppl will pay for online. Sure, we shop online, we even buy music now online (remember how HUGE that was when iTunes succeeded? ok, I used to work at a music dot.com, we were floored). But there are few micro-payment subscriptions that work.
Even our permanent LJ accounts aren't really like "paying" online. We paid once & can forget about it. That's why we love it! And I suspect there are few paid LJ users & a great many more free accounts -- that's statistically typical for any site that offers a fee-for-service option. Last time I heard for Y!, paid services (like premium fantasy sports - which is the #1 fantasy sports online, ranked higher than ESPN) accounted for maybe a quarter or, at most, a third of our revenues. Nice, but not our main biz.
Anyway, sites need engagement via some kind of interaction so user stay on their site & view ads. Then the site can sell ads based on how many ppl visit & how long they stay.
That's me trying to condense a bunch of industry gobbledy-gook in 3 minutes! Hope it makes some sense :-)
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Initially, there was a huge, negative reaction. To try to demonstrate that there was nothing to be upset about, one of the staff members posted to the forums using his full, legal name. In a matter of hours, photos of his house had been uploaded and hundreds of pizzas had been ordered to his address, among other things. I believe the decision was then made to allow staff members to use their first name only, but everyone else still has to use first and last, because apparently only staffers have to worry about psychotic gamer revenge.
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Many, if not most, online businesses have very weak privacy policies & terms of services. Most privacy policies are esp. weak regarding third-party content sharing. When I was working w/our policy team on Y!'s internal third-party guidelines a few years ago, I did a lot of research & found that only a few of the largest companies even discussed the topic. The smaller they are, the less likely they give a crap about protecting user data. And the federal laws are minimal on the whole topic.
Companies get bought, management changes, customer service & corporate communication sucks. If you find a company that has all of these things figured out perfectly & is still making enough money to survive & support millions of users, let everyone know.
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