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[superflow]

Om Malik:

Folks have been predicting a big year for mergers and acquisitions in 2005, and we are starting the year with a bang. I have learnt exclusively that Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad and Moveable Type, is about to acquire Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount. The deal is a mix of stock and cash, and

Comments

[masnomas]

Oh ai.

We're all a little concern.
'course, I didn't even know LJ was public until this morning.

[kumokasumi]

They're not.

[superflow]

Funny: I've read a lot of people saying that LJ has been dull of late...

[lowkeyknight]

we need more Stunts and Events to keep us amused, all we get at the moment is Christmas and new year stories, all of which seem a little bland and tired. No one, myself included seems to be doing, or more importantly, writing, anything exciting.

We are a lazy breed and need motivation.

[solkana]

Yep, I'm finding more and more that I'm just cruising past the long rants and just paying more attention to posts with visuals and short posts.. I've been trying to post more creatively, but it seems to be a lost cause for me..

[buttler]

saying LJ has been dull of late is a lot like saying books have been dull of late -- which is equally true, but the vast majority of anything is always going to be mediocre. LJ contains multitudes.

[omokage]

In my experience Six Apart has been a pretty good "little" company. We'll see if that experience continues.

[xerne]

What I mostly know Six Apart for is massively bungling the PR on their release of the costing-money version of their blogging script, Movable Type. LJ already has a pay system in place, though, so there's less for them to screw up, and they do seem like genuine people.

[superflow]

Six Apart did indeed screw that up in epic manner, and that's one of the things that causes me to look askance at this possibility: Six Apart appears, on the evidence, to lack the skills to converse with a community. If they're looking at LJ as a blogging system, or a collection of blogs, then things are going to get messy. LJ is knitted together by communities, not a blogging system. Six Apart already blew a hole in the side of their core support community, and there's no reason to expect them to understand the lessons taught from that.

If this is happening -- and, obviously, there are no guarantees -- then it's not like Google buying Blogger. Six Apart has Movable Type and the clever but somewhat expensive Typepad. (See above, lessons not learned.)

My expectation would be to see Typepad functionality being grafted into LJ, and the free account going away or being significantly crippled.

But it's all speculation...

[darkcryst]

Wow.. thats pretty much exactly what I was going to say on it.

Six Apart seem like a bunch of people with skills and good ideas, that really don't know how to talk to people, and more-over - to discuss things with a community.