charmian | Recent Entries

1. An interview with Matt Haughey, the creator of Metafilter, which, though it started out as a hobby, has enabled him to quit his day job and pay three employees.

The site's revenue model is not based off of membership fees (although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size), but off of advertisements, mostly in the AskMefi section. Members don't see ads, but people who stumble in via search engine or external links do.

2. In Praise of Online Obscurity

On how socializing doesn't scale.

"Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote....At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."

According to the Russian news post, there now seems to be some kind of classifieds which is powered by OLX, a free classifieds service. The integration does seem to show up in English, but there are no links to it elsewhere on the LJ site, so it seems unclear how the integration will be done in English. So far it really doesn't seem very integrated, because it really looks like the OLX site is in an iframe and no further integration has been done with Oauth or OpenID.

According to this post, Cyrillic language LJ recently passed three million members. It also says that on average, in Cyrillic LJ, each day there are 3,500 new accounts, 85 communities, 128,000 posts, and 440,000 comments.

Blog post on the importance of removing features: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/02/02/removing-features/

I found this via the Twitter of one of Posterous's founders.

In a nutshell, the pictures of the Swiss Army Knives in the pics really say it all. The problem with a bajillion features is that you need the resources to keep updating all of those features so they stay competitive and the resources to support them. Having many features also makes the software/app/website more difficult and confusing to use. Also, being spread over many niches means being potentially vulnerable to competitors who are specializing in one niche. (Kind of like evolution, I suppose).

Also, if this is left unchecked, things develop in the direction of removal becoming gradually and gradually less possible:

"If you leave features in your application just because half a dozen people actually use them, you’ll end up with Microsoft Word. Most people only use a small percentage of all features in Word. Unfortunately, most people use a different small percentage of all features in Word. Even the most unpopular, most broken feature is used by somebody. "

http://news.livejournal.com/121471.html?thread=80786303#t80786303

Livejournal is aware of the malware situation, and is collecting reports.

I'm not very savvy about the technical aspects of this situation, but it seems as if this isn't the first time that dangerous advertisements have appeared on LJ, so therefore I would encourage people to visit the site using Adblock or other similar scripts, if it is at all possible for them to do so.

I wonder what effect this will have on LJ? Already I've seen people saying that they don't want to link to LJ posts because of the intrusive advertisements (interstitial and page takeover). But if there are also not only irritating, but also disreputable and dangerous ads on there, it will further discourage non-LJ users from viewing LJ sites. This only informally increases the walled garden effect, as now, for non-paid users (Basic and Plus: functionally, for non-logged in users, Basic is indistinguishable from Plus. People who are paid and perm or use Adblock may be unaware of the extent of ads on LJ as well...), it only makes sense to use LJ if you want to put your content out there for the people who use LJ (as opposed to showing it to all of the internet).

Report of malware ads on Livejournal, with explanations on the nature of the malware being advertised and the potential risks.

Thank goodness for Adblock.

Haven't been posting that much because I've been working on a translation project. Anyway,

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061735 (Discussion of a post negatively comparing Posterous to Tumblr)

I think, since both Tumblr and Posterous are growing, it's difficult to project future growth, especially as both are works in progress. Posterous hasn't done much worth noting in the last month, but Tumblr has redesigned their Dashboard and added an "ask" feature (thereby supplanting Formspring, and complementing the 'submit' feature), and I'm very interested to see where the site is going in the future. I keep seeing more and more links to Tumblr on various sites, and even a certain egregious fan-behavior incident was brought to light (by the perpetrator) on Tumblr. However, I think Posterous is indeed forging its own path, by concentrating more on business clients, so we'll see how this turns out.

2. Also, LJ seems to be modernizing some backend stuff, while also possibly planning to include OAuth? I wonder what the OAuth implementation will look like. What will users be able to do what they can't do now?

http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8043552.html
http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8044190.html

http://wiki.oauth.net/ServiceProviders <--list of sites that use OAuth.
http://oauth.net/about/ <--what is OAuth, and how it differs from OpenID (from the creators)
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-oauth1/index.html <--technical explanation of Oauth's possibilities

3. Also, Kyle Cassidy, the LJ Advisory Board User Representative, has posted about his communications with LJ: http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/576473.html

Summary: LJ is aware of problems with the new search feature and underreporting in the stats feature. The Best Buy ads have had some bugs fixed in their implementation. Apparently, there will be another meeting Wednesday, after which he will discuss his own goals. (IIRC, they were mostly about getting an improved backup feature).

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/16338.html
http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/16590.html?style=mine

Watch out for suspicious phishing emails spoofing Dreamwidth pages. Dreamwidth is under attack by trolls which are attempting to compromise site security and have convinced Paypal not to allow Dreamwidth to use their services. (It seems that Paypal has a problem with some adult content) Anyway, though, DW will be setting up with another credit card processor in the future, so in the future it should be possible to make credit card payments again.

Let's hope that the trolls get bored and go away soon.

http://news.livejournal.com/120988.html

Hmm, LJ steps up their communication a bit by acknowledging user dissatisfaction on such issues as the Best Buy ads, the lack of the Give More promotion, and the lack of A La Carte userpics. It seems that they have made the break-through discovery that transparency works well. I don't know... as good as this change is, isn't it kind of basic that in communication with customers or heck, anyone, it is beneficial to repeat their complaints back to them to confirm that you have heard the complaint? I really think the A La Carte userpics issue could have been handled better by explaining this months ago. It costs LJ nothing to explain the issue as they did in this post.

Anyway, the other strange thing are the comments by a user called davidnewhall, whose name resembles that of an LJ staffer, but whose account is a plus account with a theoretically impossible creation date. He certainly speaks as though he is a staff member (although, not in IMHO a very optimal way for an employee to speak to customers), but doesn't have that official icon. I think this simply adds to confusion, especially if the staffer does not identify themselves clearly as a staffer.

UPDATE: http://news.livejournal.com/120988.html?thread=80611484#t80611484
The manager of operations has explained the matter and apologized for the comments. It seems that this was a test account of a systems operations person.

Apparently, my wordpress blog is blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

This is not a wordpress.com blog, but something hosted on space I pay for and with my own domain name. I'm at a loss to understand why my site was censored. Most of the posts there are about a certain light novel series. This is simply strange. The only reason I found out was because I sometimes talk to someone who lives in China who is studying English and likes to look at English translations for fun, and I invited her to go see the blog, and she told me she couldn't see it. 0_o I used some tests, and it really does seem to be the case that the my site is inaccessible from China.

In other news, ~1/3 through.

Huh, I guess sometimes LJ employees get tired of hearing people complain about the Best Buy ads: although "how is it not?" is rather cryptic.

So as not to make this post completely worthless, here, have some links:
http://futurismic.com/2009/06/29/culture-wars-authors-social-media-and-the-tribes-of-entitlement/

http://asiajin.com/blog/2009/09/22/in-japan-freemium-works-nico-nico-douga-paid-member-user-base-passes-500k/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/27/AR2008072701440.html?sub=AR

http://www.metafilter.com/87781/Steal-This-Book

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-completely-addicted-to-a-stupid-facebook-game-2009-12

For those of us too lazy to go through 41 slides, basically in Fishville you buy fish, and raise them and sell them to get more $$$, which you can use to upgrade your tank or buy more fish. The main way to get cash is selling the fish, but you can also get cash by inviting your friends and "helping" them.

This is a multi-million dollar business where much of the profits come from people buying the virtual money (and previously, scammy offers, but Zygna has now renounced them). This approach, now even more widespread in the more profitable Chinese social-network sphere, seems to be catching on in America. Will virtual goods end up being the salvation of profit-seeking social networks?

Also, does anyone else find the My Guests thing at LJ sort of useless since the majority of visitors are invisible? Also, I found out by looking at the Russian news comm that all of the users who used Cyrillic services before Dec. 15 get to keep using full stats (whereas to non-Cyrillic users the stats besides My Guests are paid/perm only features ahaha)

In other news, I am jonesing for Sengoku Musou 3, but even if I bought it now, I couldn't play it cause it is Wii only so far. :(

Yandex, the top Russian search engine, conducted a study of the Russian blogosphere. The study (PDF link), gives a fair amount of data on the various sites which make up the majority of the blogs there.

Some facts:

76% of active Russian blogs are hosted on four services: livejournal.com, blogs.mail.ru, ya.ru, and liveinternet.ru. Livejournal.com has the most active blogs. Blogs.mail.ru, however, has the most active communities.

The average Russian blogger on LJ is a 26 year old man.

In general, the number of unique visitors of all blogs is increasing faster than the number of active blogs.

Of the active participants in Russian LJ, 22% make only posts and 25% only comments (the rest do both)

Only 2% of Russian bloggers have more than 100 subscribers. 0.2% have more than 500.

Spam blogs increased dramatically in number over the last half of 2008.

I wonder how they compiled these stats? Also, it's interesting that LJ in Russia is not associate with youthful bloggers (other blogging services are). I wonder if as Wordpress.com starts to increase its translation capacities, whether it or other Wordpress MU sites will gain traction among the Russian audience.

To be honest, following the gender sign up/profile debacle, I wonder if the lesson LJ/SUP is going to take is that they should make the LJ changelog comm locked. /cynical

Well, thankfully they did roll-back, and they are now saying that they will never do this in the future, so we'll see what happens. Am also kind of surprised to see that a user rep has actually talked to LJ users, and is apparently working on some kind of status report (not related to this).

Anyway, I also noticed that after the limericks comm, LJ has now come up with a new idea: tmi_lj, which is supposedly a comm dedicated to group narratives involving TMI (too much information). However, they must be suitable for youth. Which means, predictably, they veer into toilet humor.

However, there DOES seem to be some method behind the madness: there are now new free TMI virtual gifts, which are AdNectar promotions, [note: Paid Perm users see them as Sold Out] and when you click on them, you see some videos (people doing embarrassing things, although I'm not sure the first vid is work safe), which are part of some 3M campaign for privacy films on video screens or something. There is also a link to share the TMI campaign w/ your Facebook friends.

EDIT:

Looks like stats have arrived at LJ
http://www.livejournal.com/statistics/

So far, most of them are only available to paid/perm users. However, the My Guests thing is live. People who have opted out are shown as "invisible guest."

Also, LJ seems to be holding a holiday promotion
http://www.livejournal.com/friends/holidaypromotion.bml

You can only see this if you are a paid/perm user, and what it seems to be is that paid/perm users can send $10 off coupons to Basic/Plus users. The coupons though, cannot be used to extend paid accounts.

More information on revised LJ advertising policies

And,

vito_excalibur talks about why she is going to stop posting to DW: she crossposted to LJ, and all the discussion stayed on LJ, so she sees little point in continuing to post at DW. (LJ crosspost here)

She goes on to say: "So DW improves the medium part of the LJ clone social medium, and it doesn't matter that much, because the social part is much worse. I think it might still come to work, FSVO working; but the window is narrowing on that possibility." [I think FSVO='for certain values of'?]

She argues that DW has mostly removed negative aspects of LJ (as it currently is), rather than adding things which would convince people to switch. DW as it stands is not enough of an improvement to get people involved in fandom to switch to DW, it seems. I would argue that this is correct for many people on LJ. DW is simply not enough of an upgrade for most. Possibly this is because the people left at LJ are there for the content/social, not for the media, and that people who choose blogging/social media software based on the features have already left.

Anyway, when reading her post I was confused why V_E argued that DW only had a limited amount of time to get people to switch, and I asked her about this point. So it seems that she has eventually concluded that the idea of an LJ fork is itself flawed.

I think to some extent this may be so, but that at the same time, many people are using in fairly large numbers message boards, IRC, etc., even though this tech has been obsoleted, so DW I think can still have a larger stable userbase that it does currently. (It's sort of plateaued at around slightly under Insanejournal's daily userbase)

More notes:
( Talking more about the post )

1. Seriously, LIMERICKS? Isn't there something more useful LJ staffers could be doing? WTF?

2. Posted elsewhere my thoughts on SW3 CG scenes (tl;dr version: LOL, and man, they really changed around some of the non-historical relationships), Aoi Hana (tl;dr version: too lacking in structure?, or maybe I just hate slice of life. Bailed after two vols), and Saiunkoku spoilers (tl;dr version: stuff happens, but a lot of stuff fails to happen yet. As usual recent Saiunkoku reads a lot better if you like the higher officials).

In the microblogging world, Tumblr has put out a beta Mac version of a back-up app. I can't use it yet, because I use Windows (a LOT of Tumblr's users use Macs, apparently, though), but other versions will be forthcoming. The lead developer of Tumblr, Marco Arment, was inspired to create this app because of the T-mobile data failure.

What's nice about this app is that it's very simple, in keeping with the rest of Tumblr's design philosophy: you get HTML files in folders, not archive file. But there is also the data there for developers within those files, should they need it.

In other microblogging news, Posterous has updated their group blog capabilities, to allow for group profiles and for autoblogging to each member's accounts on other services.

Anyway, for those of you who came in recently and have well, never heard of Tumblr or Posterous, both are "micro-blogging" sites, where you can blog much easily (though less powerfully) than from Wordpress. Tumblr seems more beloved of the artistic hipster crowd, and is NY-based, whereas Posterous is a Silicon Valley startup, especially popular in the tech community. Both impress me with how they seem to come out with new features on a regular basis, although it still remains to be seen how successfully they'll monetize. Right now I'm using Tumblr more often, but Posterous's features often seem more radical and intriguing (and their autopost (which is the ability to crosspost to huge amounts of sites) is impressive).

1. Give your two cents on how many icons you would want in an ideal world.

Actually, my honest answer would be "around ten or so, but I can even make do with one," so my use case is so far from what's being discussed there that it's not even funny. XD I suck so hard at making icons (I was trying to make some Ravages of Time ones, but the art really doesn't shrink down well) that I was all like "bleh, might as well just stick with this wol." For me, as a paid feature, polls are more important than having multiple icons. (And I don't really use those that much either... I must say, honestly for me, the paid features of an LJ/fork/clone don't really impact my daily usage of the site.)

I use Tumblr and Posterous (and Disqus to comment on Tumblr) and honestly, I don't really care that on those sites I can have only one icon. Heck, right now on my default layout on Tumblr, you can't even see my icon in the posts there.

2. A blogger remarks, re: FB's enhanced granular privacy features that they aren't really about privacy, but about publishing and competing with Twitter, which is an interesting hypothesis. Seems a bit far fetched, though, to claim it's also with Wordpress.

I wonder if this means that other platforms will begin to incorporate granula privacy in a manner similar to FB's implementaton of it?

Recently, LJ has been suffering from problems with their notification system. (they seem to have fixed it; I just received a notification) (http://community.livejournal.com/lj_maintenance/126582.html) So, if you're not receiving any notifications, this is why. Some people seem to be complaining in the comments about the situation, even though luckily, it appears that data hasn't been lost. Some claim that recently LJ has been having very poor uptime of basic features, but I guess I haven't noticed because I don't post at LJ much anymore and don't use many of the features, and so would be less inclined to notice.

Anyhow, in other recent news, it appears that LJ accidentally caused a virtual gift to be made available for free, so lots of people were sending them out. It is claimed, however, that this contributed to the notification problem.

So from this, it seems that people are willing to send out Virtual Gifts, they simply think that $1.00 is too high a price for them. (Or maybe any price? How elastic are these things?) Maybe LJ should give paid users like a certain amount of virtual gifts for free (which may encourage people to buy virtual gifts to reciprocate given gifts) or create an alternate means by which people may earn "money" for virtual gifts? I really wonder how much money LJ is currently making with the virtual gift system.

[EDIT: Here's where a staff member explains that it was a glitch and shouldn't have been offered for free: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_maintenance/126582.html?thread=11661430#t11661430 ]

Kind of following my previous post on OpenID:

I was reading Chris Messina (one of the people behind DiSO (which is basically a project about making social networking/media distributed, instead of centralized)'s blog, and he had some things to say about the openID's flaws on the user experience level.

In April, he talked about how openID is confusing to the technically un-inclined. The problem, as he sees it, is that openID is simply confusing users because there is too much choice. I agree that the openID logo also really doesn't help matters because people don't know what it is.

Later, he makes another post on usability issues, about 'designing for the gut'. Basically, he's saying that users demand simplicity in login, and engineers and designers cannot afford to ignore this, even if it isn't the most technically powerful solution. Simplicity wins.

Other DiSO related links:

Also, DiSO is working on Activity Streams, which is a way of standardizing data produced by various social networks. The format has already been adopted by Facebook, MSN, and many other popular sites.

Recently, Cliqset created a way to convert many feeds into the Activity Streams format. It "enables user data to pass freely from one network to another or through multiple applications, unhindered by network-specific markup and namespaces."

Chris Messina on My Name is not an URL

Namespace squatting?

However, at the same time, there seems to be another trend: the increasing dominance of Facebook in the identity field. (Which may not be a contradictory one: FB seems involved in some of these Activity Streams projects)

Yahoo recently announced they were going to increasingly integrate Facebook data into their services, and now, Myspace is rumored to have an extensive FB integration in the works. It looks like Myspace wishes to have access to the FB social graphs. Looks like the war is going to be Google v. Facebook now. XD

I'm wondering what this is going to do to the smaller blogging/publishing sites. So far Twitter seems to be somewhat aligned with Google, but that could change in the future. Microsoft is a FB investor, so they may start doing more things with them. Hard to say what's going to happen in the next year, but it may be an exciting one.

Charmian's Journal

Some links

Notes from Russian LJ

On Removing Features

effects of intrusive ads

Reports of Malware ads on LJ

Tumblr>Posterous? OAuth+LJ? and, Kyle Cassidy, LJ user rep, speaks

watch out for phishing mail

LJ communications improves?

Banned in China?!?!

Ahahaha

addictive games, more info on My Guests

LOL

some stats on the Russian blogosphere I found

LJ cynicism; stats have arrived

Social>>>Media

various things, #890786

Tumblr backup app in works, Posterous creates better group blogs

icons, and FB's hidden agenda?

LJ notification problems, free virtual gifts?

Trends in Cross-platform identity

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February 2010

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