LiveJournal

LiveJournal (LJ) is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary.LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community.

LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP in 2007, but continued to develop the site by the San Francisco-based company LiveJournal, Inc. In LiveJournal laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia.

Features

Each journal entry has its own web page, which includes the comments left by other users. In addition, each user has a journal page, which shows all of his or her most recent journal entries, along with links to the comment pages.

The most distinctive feature of LiveJournal is the "friends list," which gives the site a strong social aspect in addition to the blog services. The friends list provides various syndication and privacy services as described below. Each user has a friends page, which collects the most recent journal entries of the people on his or her friends list.

LiveJournal allows users to customize their accounts in several ways. The S2 programming language allows journal templates to be modified by members. Users may upload graphical avatars, or "userpics," which appear next to the username in prominent areas as it would on an Internet forum. Paid account holders are given full access to S2 management and more userpics, as well as other features.

Each user also has a "User Info" page, which contains a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources) and lists of friends, interests, communities and even schools which the user has attended in the past or is currently attending.

LiveJournal also allows "voice posts" to their paid and sponsored users, where one can call into the system and record an entry.

Social networking

The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternary (with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can "friend" the other without reciprocation. On LiveJournal, "friend" is also used as a verb to describe listing someone as a friend.

The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term; however, because the term "friend" is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz, as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used in this way; this conflict is discussed in greater detail below.

A user's list of friends (friends list, often shortened to flist) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users. Generally, "friending" allows the friends of a user to read protected entries and causes the friends' entries to appear on the user's "friends page." Friends can also be grouped together in "friends groups," allowing for more complex behavior in both of these features.

Privacy

LiveJournal provides an option intended to reduce the chances of search engines indexing a journal; however, the only way to make it completely impossible for such indexing to occur is setting the entry security to "friends only" or higher when first posting the entry. If an entry is first posted publicly, and then edited to reflect a higher security level, it may have already been indexed by a search engine in the time between the security edit. The popular "friends only" security option, which has since been adopted by Xanga and MySpace, hides a post from the general public so that only those on the user's friends list can read it. Some users keep all their posts friends-only (except for a single post explaining that the journal is friends-only). LiveJournal also allows users to create custom user groups within their group of friends to further restrict who can read any particular post, and to allow easy reading of subsets of a user's friends list.

LiveJournal additionally has a "private" security option which allows users to make a post that only the poster can read, thus making their LiveJournal a private diary rather than a blog. It is also possible to choose a default security setting for one's journal, so that all entries are posted at that security level by default even if one forgets to alter the security setting at the time of posting.

Users may restrict who can comment on their posts in addition to who has the ability to read their posts. Comments on a given entry may be allowed from anyone who can read the entry or restricted. Commenting may be restricted by disabling commenting altogether or by screening comments. Screened comments are visible only to the original posters until the journal owner approves the comment. These restrictions can be applied to just anonymous users, users who aren't listed as a friend, or everyone. The IP address of commenters can be logged as well if the journal owner wishes to enable it.

An option allows users to hide their 'friend of' list from public view, but leaves the list visible to the user. In this case, only the friends list is shown. When 'friend of' is allowed, journal accounts who have friended the user and who are also friended are listed in neither 'friend of' nor 'friend', but rather a third category, 'mutual friends'. This was eventually made a separate option, like the 'friend of' list, and reworded so that the lists would have to be selected to include them in a profile, rather than to select an option to remove them.

Community

User interaction

As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries and create a message board-style thread of comments – each comment can be replied to individually, starting a new thread. All users, including non-paying users, can set various options for comments: they can instruct the software to only accept comments from those on their friends list or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts). They can also screen various types of comments before they are displayed, or disable commenting entirely. Users can also have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address.

In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group journals, dubbed "communities" (frequently abbreviated as comms). Anyone who joins a community can make posts to it as they would on a regular journal; communities also have "maintainers", ordinary users who run the community and oversee membership and moderation.

In some cases legal and administrative concerns have led LiveJournal to prohibit some people from volunteering.

Demographics

As of 12 June 2011, 31,772,640 accounts exist on LiveJournal, with 1,959,750 listed as "active in some way." Of those users who provided their date of birth, the majority were in the 17-25 age group, with an exceptional large group of 31-year-olds. Of those who specified a gender, five-eighths were female.

Demographics by countries

United States

3,961,797 67.45%

Russian Federation

874,783 11.95%

Canada

353,331 5.93%

United Kingdom

338,942 5.60%

Australia

162,473 2.62%

Singapore

136,436 1.77%

Ukraine

127,688 1.62%

Philippines

77,400 1.17%

Germany

68,039 1.07%

Japan

49,438 0.82%

LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries (although there is a language selection feature), and the United States has by far the most LiveJournal users among users who choose to list a location. There is also a sizable Russian contingent. LiveJournal is the largest online community on the Runet, with about 45% of all entries in the Russian blogosphere. According to Alexa Internet 48% of LiveJournal's audience is located in Russia. The following are the ten countries LiveJournal has the most users in and the number of users as of March 20, 2009 (based on the information listed by the users):

Demographics by gender

Female

6,073,901 62.7%

Male

3,615,015 37.3%

Unspecified

4,191,634

This is the gender breakdown as of 12 June 2011: These figures only include accounts where the information is public.

Notable LiveJournals and users

Oh No They Didn't!

Main article: Oh No They Didn't

Oh No They Didn't, also known as ONTD, is the most popular community on LiveJournal, with over 100,000 members. The community is centered around celebrity gossip, and most of its posts are taken and sourced from other gossip blogs.

In the end of January 2009, Oh No They Didn't! was the first LiveJournal to surpass 16,777,216 comments (224), effectively breaking LiveJournal's previously undocumented limit on comments. This resulted in almost a week of downtime for the community, while LiveJournal worked to fix the issue.

In April 2010, the Oh No They Didn't community was moved to its own database cluster to improve site performance for all users, due to its size and the amount of traffic it was receiving.

Frank the Goat

Frank the Goat is LiveJournal's mascot. Frank is treated like an actual living being by much of the LiveJournal userbase, and his brief "biography" as well as his "journal" reflect this.

Sometimes, callers to LiveJournal's Voice Post service are informed "Frank the Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly.

A weekly comic about Frank, written and drawn by cartoonist Ryan Estrada, is updated every Thursday on the "Frank: The Comic Strip" community on LiveJournal. As of July 2009 the community has roughly 8,000 members, and is watched by more than 7,000 LiveJournal users.

Beginning at the end of January 2010, LiveJournal's weekly news posts included references to Frank's life, becoming works of short fiction at the end of February. These pieces are often tied to weekly virtual gift promotions, where commenters that meet a certain criteria will receive a free v-gift sent by Frank.

Controversies and criticism

Invite system

From September 2, 2001, until December 12, 2003, the growth of LiveJournal was checked by an "invite code" system. This curbing of membership was necessitated by a rate of growth faster than the server architecture could handle. New users were required to either obtain an invite code from an existing user or buy a paid account (which reverted to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system serendipitously reduced abuse on the site by deterring people from creating multiple throw-away accounts. The invite code system was lifted after a number of major improvements to the overall site architecture.

Elimination of the invite code system was met with mixed feelings and some opposition. LiveJournal's management pointed out that the invite code system was always intended to be temporary.

The word "friend"

The dual usage of "friend" as those whose journals one reads, and those one trusts to read one's own journal, has been criticized for being at odds with everyday use of the term. The individual users on a user's friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships and general interests, as well as courtesy friendships where a user has "friended" someone who friended them. A friends list may represent something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection or a puzzle.

The difference between online and real-world friendships is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. LiveJournal friendships are not necessarily mutual; any user can befriend or "defriend" any other user at any time.

In the Russian LiveJournal community, the word френд ("friend", an English borrowing) is often used to describe this relationship instead of the native Russian word "друг" that translates to "friend".

The Dreamwidth code fork of LiveJournal has split the 'friend' concept into its two component pieces of subscription and access.

Abuse Prevention Team decisions

As LiveJournal has grown, it has had to deal with issues involving the content it hosts. Like most web logging hosts, it has adopted a basic Terms of Service. The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as spamming, copyright violation, harassment, etc. LiveJournal created an Abuse Prevention Team and processes to handle claims about violations of the Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the law, and other issues.

If the Abuse Prevention Team determines that a violation has occurred, the user will be either required to remove the infringing material (as in the case of copyright violations); the journal will be suspended until such time as the material can be removed (e.g., posting of home addresses or other various contact information of another); or, in cases of severe or multiple violations, the journal will be suspended (e.g., account hijacking, multiple instances of copyright violation, child pornography).

Another controversy arose when users complained after an unknown number of users were asked to remove default user pictures containing images of breast feeding that were considered inappropriate as they contained a view of nipples or areolae.

Account vulnerabilities

In January 2006 the site had to make emergency changes to the way the site hosts user accounts due to a web browser-side security vulnerability. The hacker group responsible was later identified as 'Bantown'. Approximately 900,000 accounts were at risk.

LiveJournal and advertisements

In April 2006, LiveJournal announced it was introducing a new user type that gave free users some of the features available to paid members in exchange for ad sponsorship. This user type was initially called Sponsored+, but was later renamed to Plus.

This announcement was met with a whirlwind of controversy. Between April 2004 and January 2005, one of LiveJournal's Social Contract promises stated the site would, "Stay advertisement free." The Social Contract went on to say, "It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages."

Another ad-related controversy occurred in June 2006, when ads for Kpremium began installing malware and triggering pop-up ads on Australian and Western European users' computers, against the LiveJournal ad guidelines. LiveJournal responded by removing the advertisement from the website and issuing an apology to its users.

In March 2008, LiveJournal discontinued the ability for new users to select the "basic" level of journal, which allowed for a minimal set of features with no advertising at no cost.[11] However, in August of the same year, the company reversed the decision, reviving "basic" service as a manual, post-registration downgrade. However, the resumed basic service level is no longer ad-free: advertisements are displayed when readers who are not logged in to livejournal view postings on a basic account.[42]

[edit]Account suspension controversy

In May 2007, LiveJournal suspended approximately 500 accounts and communities, causing what news.com referred to as a "revolt" from "thousands of LiveJournal customers",[43] after a number of activist groups, including one named Warriors for Innocence, reported pedophilic material on its website.[43][44][45][unreliable source?][46][47]

According to Six Apart chairman and chief executive Barak Berkowitz, "We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up".[43] In a subsequent posting to the LiveJournal news community, he apologized, discussed some of the circumstances behind the suspensions, and indicated that the suspended journals would be reviewed and potentially brought back online. In particular, he noted that Livejournal's normal practice of reviewing suspensions and notifying suspended account holders had not been followed:

[T]hese journals were suspended for easily correctable problems [...] [T]his was not communicated to the journal or community owners at all. [T]hese journals were taken down before review could be completed to avoid mistakes.

Most of the backlash was from fan fiction writers whose communities and personal journals were among those suspended, seemingly only because they list interests such as "incest" or "non-con" (short for non-consensual).[43] Although these communities may not encourage illegal behavior, it has been reported that there was no further investigation into the content of these journals.

Beyond merely fan communities, many were initially upset that communities entirely unrelated to anything but the discussion, sometimes therapeutic and other times literary, of rape or child molestation were among those suspended.

On May 31, 2007, Berkowitz released a statement to the LiveJournal news community announcing that Six Apart was currently in the process of unsuspending about half of suspended journals. The journals being reinstated fell into fandom or fiction categories or were journals that were suspended for problems related only to the contents of their profiles. In an earlier interview with news.com, he had stated that he would be "shocked" if "more than a dozen" journals would be reinstated.

On July 19, 2007, Abe Hassan at LiveJournal released a statement clarifying LiveJournal's suspension policies. A further statement was made on August 7, 2007.

Advisory Board election

As previously announced, SUP, the latest owners of LiveJournal, decided to create an Advisory Board to help it make decisions. The first members were distinguished people in the areas of law and technology, Danah Boyd, Esther Dyson, Lawrence Lessig, and the original LiveJournal founder, Brad Fitzpatrick. SUP announced two other members would be appointed from the LiveJournal userbase, one Russian and one English speaking. The English speaking election was marred with accusations of ballot stuffing, conflicts of interest, and multiple death threats. The developer who wrote the poll software running the election called the ballot stuffing plausible.

Sale to Six Apart

Brad Fitzpatrick

LiveJournal's parent company, Danga Interactive, was initially formed and held entirely by Brad Fitzpatrick. However, as LiveJournal became more popular, Fitzpatrick was approached by multiple parties who wished to purchase it. He initially resisted many of these offers, not wanting his pet project (which he has characterized as his "baby") in the hands of those who did not understand the site's core principles — reliance on paid memberships to fund site operations, the absence of advertising, the volunteer support model, and LiveJournal's support of the free software movement. Nonetheless, as the administrative aspect of LiveJournal began to consume more of Fitzpatrick's time, which he would have rather spent working on the site's technical workings, he began to take the acquisition offers more seriously. In August 2007, Fitzpatrick left to work for Google.

Community reaction

Rumors of Danga's impending sale to Six Apart were first reported by Business 2.0 journalist Om Malik in his blog, on January 4, 2005. By the next evening, speculation of major changes, including a rumor that LiveJournal would require non-paying users to purchase memberships, had caused enough users to backup their journals to impact the site's performance. A few hours later, Fitzpatrick confirmed the sale, and insisted the site's core principles would not be discarded by the new ownership. He also stressed that he and other Danga employees would still continue to manage LiveJournal and that he had determined that Six Apart was committed to the site's core principles before selling.

Fitzpatrick's supporters offered rebuttals to many of these arguments. They noted that the bulk of the code running LiveJournal at the time of the acquisition would continue to be open source, as it was licensed under the GPL.

Finally, Fitzpatrick himself noted he was growing tired of the administrative aspects of the site – to the point where he had contemplated shutting down the service – and "I knew I would've shut down the site on my own if I didn't get help.

Sale to SUP

LiveJournal became extremely popular in Russia. The Russian translation of LiveJournal – ЖЖ (ZheZhe, which stands for Живой Журнал) – has become a genericized trademark for blogging in Russia, and the community boasts something close to 700,000 Russian LiveJournals, perhaps 300,000 of them active.

Six Apart licenced the Livejournal brand to the Russian company SUP in August 2006. The deal was brokered with the assistance of founder Brad Fitzpatrick. However, expatriated Russians have expressed concerns, citing links between the company and state security. Some have also worried that SUP's purchasing of the community was less to make a profit and more to curtail or even dissolve the strong independent Russian blogging community, silencing dissent the government found inconvenient. These concerns started with the licensing deal, and have grown with the announcement of the sale.

LiveJournal was sold to SUP in December 2007.

Anton Nossik, an advisor to SUP, has not reacted favourably to criticism by site users. In an interview given in March 2008, he accused LiveJournal users of "trying to scare and blackmail us, threatening to destroy our business," and stated that a large class of users have as their only purpose bringing harm to LiveJournal and its founders; "their goal is to criticize, destablilize and ruin our reputation." In the interview, he predicted that his likely reaction to such pressure would be to retaliate against the users rather than bowing to their pressure.

Launch of LiveJournal Inc

Following SUP's acquisition of LiveJournal, SUP announced that the service would be run by LiveJournal Inc.; this newly launched company is based in San Francisco and continues to run the site under US law.

Global expansion

Following LiveJournal's acquisition SUP identified three international markets (Singapore, the UK and India) which it hoped to support the services growth and seed new communities. LiveJournal recently launched new communities in India and has undertaken a reach-out programme with bloggers in Singapore. On June 8, 2011, it was announced that LiveJournal will launch local start-pages across South-East Asia and India catering to the large community the site has built here. 

Other sites running the LiveJournal engine

For more details on this topic, see Comparison of sites using the LiveJournal codebase.

The software running LiveJournal is open source and primarily written in Perl. Because of this, many other communities have been designed using the LiveJournal software.