Undertake and publish research on livejournal usage

[radiantsoul]

Title
Undertake and publish research on livejournal usage

Short, concise description of the idea
I would like to see some research undertaken on who uses LJ, how it is used, types of social network

Full description of the ideaThis could be done by sampling a few thousand random, but active journals. Questionnaires could be issued to determine how/why

Comments

[radiantsoul]

To an extent this is true, but livejournal itself could do it to establish priorities. As you probably agree the advisory board thing scarcely works.

[charliemc]

While I love this in concept, it's a very time-consuming project. I don't know that LiveJournal has the resources (staff, money, free time) to implement this...

[scien]

I understand the instinct to get DATA MORE DATA YAYY but I think you need to know what you're going to use it for so that you can come up with an appropriate methodology (what to ask, who to ask, etc). You say it would enable better development 'targetting', can you elaborate on how exactly?

[radiantsoul]

I have this thing with livejournal that there is too much that is sort of beta - scrapbook, singles, schools, to do list, portal, dashboad, etc.

Then there some thing that people seem to want that don't happen, an example is a la carte user pics which is something people are prepared to pay for yet hasn't moved forwards since last August.

Then there is something simple like the question of the day which is pretty neat(even if the questions are not always amazing!)

Of course these are just my opinions and others may value features differently. It would be interesting to find out.

[scien]

And how would friends numbers/community members/data on why people post or friend people/etc help you find that out?

In your comment, it sounds to me like you want more of a 'vote on your top 5 most wanted development ideas' thing rather than general info on how LJ is used.

[radiantsoul]

Well my idea is more to set general priroties - a sort of who are are customers approach. Beyond that you can then start to set specific development goals. I am not sure if LJ even knows how many users it has. Probably it is significantly less than the number of accounts.

I don't think a top five development ideas whould be a bad thing.

I find it odd that the a la carte user pic thing hasn't happened. I really struggle to see how a company would be so slow in implementing something with a presuably low marginal cost and high customer demand.

[worldserpent]

So uh... how do we know that LJ isn't already sampling and gathering internal data?

I also would like to see more development, but it seems that LJ doesn't lack for development goals, judging by all the stuff they say they are working on.

[foxfirefey]

Sidenotes: did you see this paper? LJ also recently did a paid features poll. You might also enjoy lj_research. I think the HarrisInteractive survey they're participating might give them some results back, but I don't know if LJ will publish them or even if it would really be interesting to most users besides datahounds.

I don't think this is a bad idea, but I think it might take more effort and time than what the results will be worth in the end.

[desh]

Heh, did you catch the date on your first link?

[foxfirefey]

2008-12-19? Yeah, it's not too horribly long ago.

[desh]

Nope, December 2009.