Social media inward looking wankery

[matgb]

Couldn't resist writing this one up: In post-Soviet Russia, President blogs you. The President of Russia has a Livejournal (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.

Comments

[charmian]

Hi, randomly wandering in: you may be interested in some of the links I've collected machine-translated from Russian, which seem to show some more stuff about SUP's future Cyrillic-LJ moves.

Hmm... Personally speaking, I do wish that LJ would port over more of these broadcast user tools to the English LJ side, because some of them are useful.

I'm not sure what effect DW will have on LJ. Maybe none. What will be more critical, I think (well, in my underinformed way), is competition with new hybrid-socialnetwork blogging sites, social networking software incorporating blogs (such as Buddypress), and microblogs like Tumblr. These I can see sapping LJ's audience.

[matgb]

I think they have been for years—a lot of my friends that used to use LJ constantly now rarely if ever post, but are on Facebook constantly. Many more of my friends that before a couple years back would've been talked into signing up use FB and a blogging platform instead, etc.

NB; I've no objection to the broadcast model, but it's the concentration on that over the disparate barely crossing over groups model that LJ has in UK/US that bothers me, both need development. I tend to act like a broadcast blog a lot, but my friends don't, and I'm there primarily for friends after all.

[charmian]

IDK, from a certain perspective, maybe it does make sense? If LJ has strong business potential in Russia/Ukraine/etc, but much less in the US, then it makes sense to focus operations and development in that direction, and work on seeking/maintaining growth in that sector. Obviously I wish that LJ did pay more development attention to the US/UK/English-speaking sector (it's a big component in my interest in DW), though.

However, if people are using blogging platforms and FB (and twitter) in combination instead of LJ, it's going to be really hard for LJ to appeal to those folks, because those sites follow different ways of usage which are in some ways antithetical to LJ's.

(Someone I know who studies business and IT described LJ as 'deprecated' because the code is so old; I don't know how accurate that is, but it really does seem as though the industry has little interest in it at all, when you look at the influential social networking/blogging press)