Mat Bowles

Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace a few years back. He likes to make money out of stupid people. His official biographer summarises his opinion of the site and its users:

I don’t think that’s true. I think it is—if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.

Which, in slightly less fragrent terms, is what I've read about the demographics of MySpace use as opposed to Facebook use (Livejournal demographics are a subset of the Facebook demographic, Facebook is used by educated people, LJ is used by educated goths, geeks and weirdoes). All of this via the excellent jleach, who is The Independent's digital media editor.

I was planning on doing a whole "LJ has grown up and poached The Independent from Six Apart" post, but I haven't. So here we go. LJ has poached the Indy and is working on others. They were using the execrable TypePad service for their blogs, now they're on here. And promoting LJ to their readers and website users. So there's a big influx of slightly confused new users with the 'Independent Minds' logo as their default userpic. If you see it, be nice, a lot of them are all confused.

Oh, and my 'Livejournal is doomed' posts that used to be fairly regular aren't any more—the new owners, it seems, definitely 'get' what the site could be, and are working towards it. For the first time in years, we're back above a million active users per month now. That's awesome.

LJ is competing with the big boys of blogging now. And it looks like it could be winning.

Briefly, for obvious reasons I've been busy and not following too closely last few days, but on the most recent news I concur win demiurgent (Eric Burns of websnark). I've said a few times here and elsewhere that while the law itself in the US is fairly clear, there are grey areas that will need a test case; where does the boundary lie? One thing I'm sure of, Eric:

Six Apart doesn't want this to be a test case. But I promise you fanfiction communities really don't want this as a test case.

Because while 6A may have broken Californian consumer law (really, not my field), doing this:

They stated that they had received a number of complaints, and that they were contacting Six Apart to try and act as a liason between the unhappy consumers and the company. He did say that he would be contacting me, should Six Apart fail to respond, and that they may need me to provide further information "for legal action against this company by our office on behalf of the consumers".

Almost certainly going to cause more trouble than it solves. Legal spotlight, front and centre, on Lj & 6A. Therefore to include child porn allegations, copyright infringements, etc. The CA AG may not go that way, but it'll get publicity, and other lawyers.

Read the comments of that IJ post; the person who's started it has NO IDEA that this could cause other issues. Houston? We have a problem...

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Lovely lunch now finished, back to work...

At the beginning of last year during the Bantown cracking incident, I posted about the sucky LJ customer relations. For those wondering why I, and a lot of other unaffected people, are pissed of this time, liz_marcs has done a very similar explanation, thus saving me the effort. Summary:

• The fans who posted the pics were idiots
• LJ/6A still haven't clarified their policies
• The policies have been implemented badly, in a very cack-handed manner
• The Powers that be still haven't managed to understand the way the LJ fen can and will network and react

Key point:

However, LJ/6A continues to treat us (the customers) with contempt, or like we were drama queens with entitlement issues. To be fair, some people are acting like drama queens with entitlement issues, but it's not good customer service for LJ/6A to lump everyone into the same drama queen category. It's really bad customer service to act like that's the case. It's horrendous customer service to not respond to questions and repeated requests for clarification or to respond with vague statements that could be interpreted any number of ways.

I have other posts planned, on real world meaty issues. But I'm reading my new books, and wrestling with install scripts, and screaming at idiots. So they can wait until I'm in the mood.

1. Clickz.com has an interview with the Six Apart CEO
   • foxfirefey gives it a good fisking^[1], and goes through a whole load of useful numbers ^[2]. Seriously, go read.
   • Given the factual innacuracies in the article, I emailed the author. Despite the 6A spin, he admits that the mistakes are his. He says he'll fix it ^[3].
2. My good friend draich_goch is having problems with his garage.
   • Remember this idea from June?
   • We decided to do Blears and mapp, but never got around to setting it up.
   • Let's do it

Setting up those Google Bombs

Right, there were going to be two, but in order to assist Jason and get some petty revenge, I'm adding a third. Feel free to do one, two, or three of them. Theoretically, it only takes a week or so to work, but this'll be the first one I'm aware of entirely via Livejournal.

Instructions

( Links, guidelines, and a copy past post )
which should give an output something like:

I'm participating in matgb's attempt at the first proper Livejournal Google Bomb. We have decided to promote a cowardly genius, denigrate an insubstantial careerist and point out to the world a bunch of lying bastards. For more information go here.

The links list entries are the most important, as Google really likes to index front-page links, but also picks up links from sub pages as well.

( Footnotes and added commentary )

Entry #5003 in the ongoing 6 Apart are useless series to be found on this journal. This time, courtesy of an unusual source:

Apparently comma-separated lists are too complicated now, so we give you checkboxes to ask if you're interested in emo or snowboarding:

http://www.livejournal.com/manage/profile/

Wow.

Also note the lack of <label> tags.

:-(

Typical LJer whinging about how Emo is a popular interest? Well, only if by typical you include the founder of the whole thing brad. FFS, interest searches worked badly in the first place, then they added in the userpic disply thing making it dial up unfriendly, now they're actively promoting the most popular interests so that there will be even more users with them. Ye gods, will they never learn?

brad's also not happy with the way it's coded, and is apparently no longer in charge. So, the solution? It appears to be a dynamic list of interests (I mean, who would select emo as a promotional tool for the site?). So, um, join the checkbox tyranny resistance by adding it to your interests? 'Falsifying statistics' is another good one as well, that's been going for ages though.

In fact, tell your friends. Tell all your friends. Meh, things continue going downhill.

Wonder when the venture capital runs out and the company gets split up as the loss making mess it is? Ah, wait, LJ is the only profit arm, ergo LJ'll be bought by someone like Murduch. We're screwed. Here's hoping firefoxfey's lj2wordpress project works off, so you can have all the utility of LJ but hosted on your own space and not relying on a datacenter built over one of the most famous earthquake zones in the world...

OK, lithium_doll sent me an invite, so I thought I'd spend the evening playing around. Make that less than an hour playing around.

First impressions? It sucks. Supposedly, it's easy to use ("turnkey" in the ad blurb, aimed exclusively at a US audience obviously). Well, maybe it is.

( Making the layout look not-ugly (pretty isn't an option) )

I then tried to make a post. Now, this appears to be easy, and idiot proof. Except it's rich text only, using clunky icons that are similar to standards but, well, look wrong.

( Making posts - idiot proof, but only good for idiots )

( Six apart remain rubbish, but there are some good points )

But, overall, for a company that owns a succesful platform that could easily have a turnkey interface bolted on to set up a different, competing, inferior platform is just daft. If they implemented the good bits from Vox into LJ, then they'd be spending less money and making a better product. Ah well.

Guess what I did this weekend? That's right, I did nothing. Wonderful. I need to get some energy back and break the apathy attack

Can someone with a free (ie not sponsored+) account test something? Apparently, Sponsored+ can now post polls. Apparently, you can switch to sponsored+, posta poll, then switch back to free, losing nothing, having ads for the 5 minutes it takes to post the poll, and then not seeing them again.

Sounds like a plan to me; can somoene try it?

(And I need a 6-apart suck icon...)

Firstly, azurelunatic brings the funny. Next, alexlucard polls it good. demiurgent brings a sense of perspective.

The vast majority of folks who pay for Paid do it for A) convenience (say, for the Livejournal.com e-mail address) or B) because they want to support Livejournal. A smaller subsection want the extra userpics. Six Apart apparently believes that they can get as much money in advertising revenues to make up for people deciding they don't want to do the public television model of support.

At the end of the day, I use LJ to keep in touch with my friends, 90% of whom are now on here or syndicated. I'll be staying. I don't, actually, mind ads that much (I use them to pay bills on my sites, right?), I just dislike the way they've, effectively, broken a promise.

Although, they are doing it in a fairly cool way, and even when logged out and looking for them, it's not MySpace. For the record, I now cannot load most myspace profiles, my dial up simply gives up. That is one really badly put together site, but hey, Murdoch is paying for the bandwidth.

Given that it's Thursday, I really should have gotten around to doing my "I had a great weekend" post like wot I meant to on Tuesday. Suffice to say, I had a great weekend. Two people I'm close to had birthdays, and seeing either of them always cheers me up. Also, free chocolate.

Tomorrow, I go to draich_goch's to play Kingmaker and sleep, then first thing he's taking us toa coach meeting point; we're off to London for Salute.

Livejournal will now be selling adverts. Only to those who want extra features for free and don't mind adverts, but they're still going to be selling adverts. daweaver isn't at all impressed, and I'm, well, confused.

Y'see, the LJ business model made sense to me. There are free riders and paid users. Those of us that pay do so because we value the service so much we pay for our account, thus subsidising the free riders. The benefits of a paid account are strong (although not as strong as they were), but we also acknowledge that we're supporting LJ, keeping it ad free, and encouraging others to use it in the knowledge that some of them will like it so much that they will also pay, thus keeping LJ going. The Rational Choice theorist in me respects this business model.

Now? We are to have another level of user, that disrupts the business model. No longer does my contribution support the rest, ads are sold to support the company, the free riders aren't just supported by the paid users. I don't know how to react to that. Still, it will give me another decision to make in August, free, paid or ads? Thing is, the ad revenue isn't mine. It's LJs. Given we have Open ID, I may switch away completely and just use my typekey open id login. Get all the benefits of LJ friends pages without the drawbacks of the Six Apart business model. We'll see.

Summary. Oh yeah, they want feedback. Go give it.

Hey everyone, guess what? Yup, you've got to log in (again) and are probably going to encounter some more problems for a bit longer. It appears that putting news, lj_dev and lj_maintenance on your main friends page is currently an esential plan.

Great. You see, the thing is, from what I can tell, they could've predicted some of these problems, they could have warned us, they could have... You get the picture.

So, here's how to deal with this sort of thing and not piss off your paying customers. ( A list of what they should have done )
Here's what Livejournal have instead done:( The list of what they did do )
Yup, I'm pissed. Keeping your paying customers happy is something that businesses need to do. I love LJ, I like the flexibility, the utility, the community. But the management and PR people suck. I effectively work in marketing/PR (it's a significant part of my job), and I know pissing people off by not keeping them informed is a bad idea. When the people you piss off most are the paying customers that your business model relies on heavily? Clusterfuck.

Short version: log in (again). Oh yeah, one good thing, Manage your login sessions (if they get it working...)