emacsen's journal - The sinking ship

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February 1st, 2009

07:43 am

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The sinking ship
As others have pointed out, it feels like LiveJournal is a sinking ship. With the company's "merger" a few years ago now resulting in all the LiveJournal infrastructure moving to Russia, I think we can safely say that the culture of Livejournal has, and will continue to change.

At the same time I and many others have joined Facebook, the ultimate peer pressure application.

It's been suggested that I love my LJ posts to Facebook, but I won't do that, and here's why

Facebook, for all its interesting features, remains in the walled-garden model of applications. It's designed to bring users into the system and keep them there. To that end, they require logins for most functions, do not accept standard like OpenID and in their TOS, claim an unlimited license to any works placed in the system.

You can contrast this with sites like Livejournal. No one needs to be a member of Livejournal to read a feed, and with the addition of OpenID a few years ago, you didn't even need to be a member to post or even read friends-only entries. You don't need to be a member of Flickr to view pictures, and you don't need to use Google to talk to someone on GTalk. All of these are "lock-ins" on Facebook.

Beyond the ethical issues, it's been my experience that walled gardens are intense but short lived. AOL was one the largest walled gardens, pre-Internet, and it lasted about ten years, while MySpace as a phenomenon lasted only three or four years. Walled gardens attempt to provide every application to everyone but ultimately specialized sites like Twitter will come around and offer a better service.

So, if a walled garden is both ethically and practically doomed, what is the solution?

I'm afraid that at this point, I'm at a loss. I certainly could install my own blog engine on my own web servers. This would get me away from the situation with LiveJournal but it wouldn't afford me the same flexibillity either. On LJ I have friend filters. I could implement them using OpenID[1] but then we're once-again limited by the technology. After all, do we expect that every friend of mine will know how to use OpenID and then know to use the special RSS feed?

Until I have answers or until LiveJournal makes a specific move that I feel is threatening or concerning, I'll be sticking put. But I'll still be using ljcharm to back up my entire post history should I need to leave in a hurry.

[1] I'll spare you the gory details about why RSS Auth is a failure and simply say that the solution appears to be "throw out any hope of genuine authentication in favor of "magic feed strings"

Tags: metablogging

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From:	nanofemto
Date:	February 2nd, 2009 05:05 pm (UTC)

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You have just succinctly described exactly how I am feeling about LJ and Facebook. I really don't want to post my content on FB because of the draconian copyright. It's interesting because a *lot* of people have found me, or I found them, but the tool does little more for me than providing a social ping. I am considering putting a wordpress or similar blog tool on my web service, but the loss of friend filters has me in a holding pattern.

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