Social media inward looking wankery
2009-May-05, Tuesday 22:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matgbCouldn't resist writing this one up: In post-Soviet Russia, President blogs you. The President of Russia has a Livejournal (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
blog_medvedev) and updates it (or gets someone to, anyway) fairly regularly.
There's been a bit of talk recently that LJ was doomed to die. Some have even said that Dreamwidth is going to kill it off by fragmenting it. I never thought the latter was even possible, because the whole point of Dreamwidth is to maintain interoperability between the sites. Sure, it's not fully working yet, but it's what, day 5 of open beta? This isn't a Google style web 2.0 perpetual beta, it's a proper full on beta test.
But given that the most important politician in Russia is using LJ to blog, I'd say the site has a future, or at least, SUP has a constant revenue stream. The thing is, the money and interest is coming from Russia, the dev team is now mostly based in Russia, and the Russia model of using LJ just isn't what I want to see emphasised. It's great that it's the biggest blogging site over there by a long way, but it's broadcast model, not conversation model.
Ah well. I'm supposed to be writing up what's wrong with the OpenID implementation on both LJ and DW, but I keep getting distracted.
Short version: On both sites, if you haven't validated your email address you're treated as an anonymous user. Which means that people can give you access to their private posts, but you can't comment there if they've disabled anonymous comments.
Worse, even if you've got a validated email and you've commented there before, if they've disabled anonymous comments you can't log in from the comment form, whereas a user with an account can. That's really bad from an end user perspective.
DW at least has an excuse, 5 days into public beta and still frantically updating the code base. LJ? First site, worldwide, to support OpenID as a provider and for end users. Despite it now being common and the UI being considerably updated, LJ has barely touched what they've done. They don't even provide links to the email validator when you login.
That's pathetic. Hopefully the competitive pressure from DW will push them into making more improvements, like it has done elsewhere. Competition is, after all, a good thing, and LJs been stuck in its own little rut with nowt but a bunch of clones for too long.
Meh, rambling. Time to go do something constructive.
blog_medvedev) and updates it (or gets someone to, anyway) fairly regularly. There's been a bit of talk recently that LJ was doomed to die. Some have even said that Dreamwidth is going to kill it off by fragmenting it. I never thought the latter was even possible, because the whole point of Dreamwidth is to maintain interoperability between the sites. Sure, it's not fully working yet, but it's what, day 5 of open beta? This isn't a Google style web 2.0 perpetual beta, it's a proper full on beta test.
But given that the most important politician in Russia is using LJ to blog, I'd say the site has a future, or at least, SUP has a constant revenue stream. The thing is, the money and interest is coming from Russia, the dev team is now mostly based in Russia, and the Russia model of using LJ just isn't what I want to see emphasised. It's great that it's the biggest blogging site over there by a long way, but it's broadcast model, not conversation model.
Ah well. I'm supposed to be writing up what's wrong with the OpenID implementation on both LJ and DW, but I keep getting distracted.
Short version: On both sites, if you haven't validated your email address you're treated as an anonymous user. Which means that people can give you access to their private posts, but you can't comment there if they've disabled anonymous comments.
Worse, even if you've got a validated email and you've commented there before, if they've disabled anonymous comments you can't log in from the comment form, whereas a user with an account can. That's really bad from an end user perspective.
DW at least has an excuse, 5 days into public beta and still frantically updating the code base. LJ? First site, worldwide, to support OpenID as a provider and for end users. Despite it now being common and the UI being considerably updated, LJ has barely touched what they've done. They don't even provide links to the email validator when you login.
That's pathetic. Hopefully the competitive pressure from DW will push them into making more improvements, like it has done elsewhere. Competition is, after all, a good thing, and LJs been stuck in its own little rut with nowt but a bunch of clones for too long.
Meh, rambling. Time to go do something constructive.
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