LJ's future

[lexpendragon]

Title
LJ's future

Short, concise description of the idea
LJ is less popular than Facebook and Twitter, and I have an idea for living on that kind of Internet.

Full description of the ideaI still like LJ, specifically for posts like this my most recent one, which allow me to go into excruciatingly long and dull detail on what I'm thinking, instead of

Comments

[the_cynic]

1) Short URL services are gigantic Spam magnets. LJ already has enough problems with spammers opening accounts and sending emails with links back to those accounts, leaving comments with those accounts, etc. Why would LJ want to develop yet another system that allows ease of use by spammers.

2) Aren't there enough of these services around already? tinyurl, bit.ly, etc. etc. etc.

[charliemc]

Agreed.

[mooism]

This is two ideas in one:

(1) a tinyurl service just for LJ
(2) making it easy to link to LJ posts from Facebook/Twitter/etc

I don't see the point of (1).

I can see that (2) would be useful for some people, although I would use it rarely if ever myself.

[mooism]

Oh, and I don't like your proposed user experience. I'd want to tick a tickybox or add a tag, and have that make my post get tweeted. The point of integrating websites like this is that I shouldn't have to copy or paste text around.

[azurelunatic]

I've been seeing changelog action on something called "Share This!", which sounds as if it could answer the need that drives this suggestion.

[brilliant_blue]

Sorry but I didn't understand a single thing of the idea you exposed -_-"
I don't use Facebook, nor Twitter and I guess, well maybe..., I'm not the only one who doesn't care for those kind of network stuff...

[februaryfour]

Yeah, you're not the only one. Facebook is a big address book for me--I use it to contact people I don't otherwise have contact details for. I absolutely detest Twitter (I privately consider users of Twitter "Twits".) I don't have any other social network accounts except Mixi, and I don't use that either--that's just for Japanese friends to get in touch with me a la Facebook messages.

[azurelunatic]

One advantage to an LJ-specific URL-shortening service could be, if implemented in this way, that only a LiveJournal address could be shortened in this way. Thus if you clicked on an LJ-specific short URL, you would know that you'd be going to LiveJournal (somewhere), rather than some offsite place.

That could build trust for LJ short-links.

[the_cynic]

As I stated in my initial comment, LJ is filled with accounts containing nothing but spam. A link to livejournal.com indicates that you are going to livejournal.com, but certainly doesn't provide any greater sense of safety.

[vvalkyri]

True, but since LJ doesn't allow embedded code to do nasty things (at least I think I remember there being some distinct limits on what can be done on an LJ page) it's still safer than clicking some bit.ly that goes to who knows where. Worst that happens is "oh. yeah, an ad."

[foxfirefey]

Well, not necessarily considering those ads occasionally carry malware because the way the ad code is embedded, it finds ways to do nasty things.

[koulagirl666]

I think this would only really work if Twitter and Facebook allowed OpenID, because this only really useful for people who already use multiple sites. If people who had external accounts could come over to LJ and access friendslocked stuff through this with OpenID, it would be one thing, but without that it just seems pointless. If someone really wants to link, they can copy+paste their link, which is under Twitter's limit anyway, and it's the same amount of work.

Also, it's not really going to encourage new people to come over to LJ. They especially won't create an account to read public entries, and if they already have an account they won't really need the headsup on an external service.

I think what you're talking about already exists to a degree with Facebook as well (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=279&q=facebook&lang=en_LJ).