Cross Site Authenticated Flist Reading, and Poking Around Cyrillic LJ

[charmian]

1. In comments, stealthily asserts that Dreamwidth does (well, actually will) have a 'killer app': bug 710, cross-site authenticated friends page reading. This feature (as stated in the specs) will allow DW users to see their LJ friends lists on Dreamwidth, including whatever locked entries they can view.

Personally speaking, I'm unlikely to use this feature as I'm comfortable using several different sites, and because I deleted my main LJ journal, and now keep a smaller one whose content is very different from this journal's. However, this feature will be a great boon for those with large LJ friendslists, and will probably be welcomed by the DW userbase.

I'm not sure at all what LJ/SUP will think about it, but I kind of suspect it'll cause some angst among the LJ userbase, especially as there seems to be some caching on the DW end, and because it's specifically targeted to read locked entries. Will it really be the killer app? Maybe, but not necessarily, IMHO. It will probably be most useful for those who have something to read on DW already, or those who already maintain a DW and crosspost to LJ. Plus, a lot of people have switched off their syndicated feeds on LJ for privacy reasons. What do you think?

2. Been poking around Cyrillic LJ (more detailed report to follow soon)

The first things you notice are that the search form is front and center in the Lanzelot site scheme, and that on the main page there's a list of most popular current entries on LJ, as well as a list of the most popular users and communities. IMHO, this is fairly useful for new users.

Another difference is the presence of the 'statistics' option near the userpic in the corner. This link actually though, leads off of the livejournal.com domain, and towards the livejournal.ru domain (the link is livejournal.ru/counter). Why this is so, I don't know, except to promote LJ.RU? The "main" menu heading also leads to livejournal.ru.

The statistics do go beyond the My Guests thing, and include regular hits and unique visitors, so I suppose this will eventually be rolled out to the rest of LJ. Maybe what is taking them so long is that they've got to integrate it into livejournal.com for the rest of the users? Seems according to changelog that something is being done there, though.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

One of the original purposes of SUP's partnership with LJ was that they had Russian-local servers and could thus serve Russia their content better and faster. So that's a consideration for a different domain (or subdomain) for anything that's aimed at a Russian-local audience.

[charmian]

Yeah, but what I find weird is that the statistics are hosted there, when the rest is more obviously Russian-centric content, like a directory of Russian communities. But perhaps they're there because they're hosted on the lj.ru servers.

[azurelunatic]

Statistics have been available through Cyrillic Services for, um. A year? More? But there have been various assorted issues bringing it over, surely not all of which volunteers have been privy to, and surely at least some in part to do with the English-speaking userbase's incredible feature conservatism. I vaguely recall a few moments, though I'm sure I'm conflating a whole bunch of other things, where something we were told was probably going to be out in the next release was delayed quite far in the future because of the "oh, hell no, this is not going to fly as-is" it got in beta.

[charmian]

Oh, what I meant was that it's weird that on LJ for Cyrillic stuff, they're on the .ru part rather than just somewhere in the .com part, but maybe it's not possible to do that w/o allowing the English speakers to use it. From seeing lj_ru_support, it seems that sometimes it's broken, so maybe there are technical fixes that need to be had also.

Yeah, there is a lot of incredible feature conservatism there. I can't understand Russian, but except for the My Guests thing (which I've seen on Mixi and other things I've used like OkCupid), it honestly doesn't seem like a very exceptional or shocking statistics feature. My main complaint would be lack of referrer. (as least as far as I can see)

(Actually, also, having Google Analytics on DW doesn't seem to have changed much at all about the service. But maybe stats inside the service are different)

[azurelunatic]

In my Epic Thing (which is up to 5k words and counting) I've pinned a belief in community fragility to old school.

[charmian]

Heh, how is that going? You've made me quite curious about it. :D Maybe you should break it into two parts or something, because if you're going to put it on LJ, you might break the size limit.

Hmm, I wonder (depending on how community fragility is defined) whether they are correct or not.

[azurelunatic]

The 10k word thing I did for Tupshin fit all right, but just barely. Sadly, this is one of the things that I don't think I can post half-finished, though when it's done it might have to be a two-parter.

[charmian]

Oooh, thanks for a peek at the draft! I'll reserve my comments until the opus is completed. ^_^

[azurelunatic]

If you have any comments about stuff, like stuff you disagree with or stuff that seems to be left out (other than, well, things on the parallel lists that haven't yet been slammed up against each other, because I'm only about half done with those), now is a good time, because this is one of the things I'm working at and polishing, not just throwing together.

[torachan]

I don't know if I'm going to want to read my LJ flist on DW or not, but I will definitely want to read my IJ flist here, because there are only two people on it now and I hate having to check it for just two people.

[damned_colonial]

*nod*, I'm in this situation wrt LJ. It's not that I don't visit multiple sites (I do), but that I prefer to aggregate to some extent, and not visit sites that don't give me much content.

[charmian]

Hmm, so you don't get much content from LJ? My LJ flist is now rather small, but for me, commenting is a large part of that, so I don't mind logging in.

[damned_colonial]

So here's the thing. I mostly read people's blogs/journals/whatevers through aggregators: Google Reader, my DW reading page, or my LJ friends list. On all three of those aggregated reading pages, I see posts, and links that I can click on to read comments or to comment myself. If I want to read comments or to comment myself, I am going to have to click through, no matter where I read.

The volumes I read are maybe 300 a day on GR, 100 on DW, and 5 on LJ. I visit GR constantly throughout the day, DW maybe 2-3 times a day, and LJ... every few days, I guess. The volume's just not there to make it worthwhile for me to go to LJ all the time.

[charmian]

Ah, I see... It's too bad there isn't a way on LJ to at least get those posts mailed to you or something. On Posterous they have such a feature.

[damned_colonial]

Well, I could subscribe to them via RSS (on GR or DW) but then I'd miss locked posts. And I can get LJ to email me but I have to request it on a per-journal basis. And I don't really want it by email anyway. So that's why I want DW to have the read-your-LJ-friends-here feature! I'll be in that reading-personal-posts-from-people-i-know headspace, and in the mood for it, and it will work perfectly.

[charmian]

How is IJ doing nowadays? Someone implied they were having problems.

[torachan]

I have no idea. I was never involved with the community there at all and only crosspost/read because some friends moved there.

[foxfirefey]

As an observant outsider: They're doing okay, but pretty much in stasis. Their finances are a bit hand to mouth sometimes (permanent sales happening when they come up short for one reason or the other, like after purchasing a backup solution). They have what I consider to be a fairly stable nuclear core of users, and they're bigger than Dreamwidth. I think it's very attractive to feature conservative users, because it doesn't change much.

On the other hand, LJ has a huge spam problem and it's possible IJ does too but it doesn't reveal itself as much due to the lack of a latest page. The stats page does have a few of the newest/most latest updated journals as being spam ones, though, for instance:

http://gilhayden5884.insanejournal.com/
http://marcosgreene448.insanejournal.com/

So, that's something to consider as well. Their Support Board is pretty closed off, so it's hard to tell the condition of support, but people sometimes use the comments on news pages as a support board.

Squeaky is holding his own running the site, but sometimes the little touches are understandably hard to attend to--one of the problems of scans_daily is that they've never heard back from Squeaky about some of their questions.

I'm not sure if the site can afford to get more popular unless that popularity brings in more funding proportionately; it has occasional strain and downtime under the current load.

[charmian]

Thanks for the info. I wonder if it is sustainable, though, especially as the spam problem with LJ and clone sites seem so intractable.

Oh, are they bigger? How much more?

Hmm, do you think it will get popular? The main drive of the growth of LJ clones seems to be LJ doing something unpopular, and they haven't done that in awhile.

[foxfirefey]

Here's the two service stat pages:

http://www.insanejournal.com/stats.bml
http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats.bml

IJ currently has:
* Total accounts: 523862
* ... active in some way: 83058
* ... that have ever updated: 273478
* ... updating in last 30 days: 37054
* ... updating in last 7 days: 13733
* ... updating in past 24 hours: 4183

DW currently has:
# Total Accounts: 455608
# That are active in some way: 19324
# That have ever posted an entry: 35966
# That have posted an entry in last 30 days: 11082
# That have posted an entry in the last 7 days: 7412
# That have posted an entry in the last 24 hours: 3309

I only count active in some way or posted an entry stats for this kind of a thing. So, basically DW's "nuclear core" of accounts with posts in the past day, so to speak, is about 3/4s of IJs, but IJ's "long tail" is 4 times bigger. However, IJ's numbers are likely to have some unknown amount of inflation due to spam. IJ is also notably popular with RPGs, as well, which generate many active accounts all run by the same person. Because of this, I also look at analytics sites to compare:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dreamwidth.org+insanejournal.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/insanejournal.com+dreamwidth.org/

DW is going to be taking over some of that traffic soon, because you can see some of IJ's top search terms have to do with scans_daily, which is going to move to DW

I don't think IJ will get more popular, much less popular. If LJ does something unpopular again that manages to drive people away, I think most people would go to DW (easy importing) or stop using LJ-ish services (stay on Facebook, use something like WordPress). Exceptions would probably be RPers, who would find the 15 icons on DW to be restrictive compared to the 100 on IJ (but, offering that many icons has a downside to IJ too, in that it increases load without increasing revenue). So, a bit of a self limiting factor may be at work--people may go to IJ and some may end up at DW (or back at LJ) if IJ starts being unstable, until the load on IJ stabalizes and the remaining population doesn't have a reason to go. If something happens to IJ, refugees would probably split between LJ and DW, depending on why they ended up at IJ in the first place.

[charmian]

Wow, thanks for the stats! So it seems that IJ is indeed larger than DW, although you're right, the RP stuff and the spammination does inflate some of it.

How big of a factor is RP in the popularity of IJ, you think? 100 icons seems to be quite a lot. 0_o

Yeah, I agree. If LJ does something unpopular on content grounds these days, probably DW will end up with the lion's share of the refugees.

[foxfirefey]

It is a lot of icons, considering they're expensive to offer compared to other features.

I did a bit of a quick overview of the latest created/updated accounts on IJ's stat page and by my unscientific guess RP is the BIGGEST factor in IJ's popularity, with account types as follows:

feed
normal
rpg account
spam
spam
rpg account
rpg comm
unknown
belongs to an rpg ad comm only
unknown
feed
possibly an rpg account?
rpg account
belongs to rpg ad comm
nano account
fanfic account
rpg account
rpg account

A good percentage belong to this rpg ad community: http://asylums.insanejournal.com/rps/

Profile says it's huge, over 50,000 members (since that's the cut off), though there's no way of knowing how many of those accounts are still active. I wouldn't be surprised if RPGs were the majority of IJ's activity.

And I don't know if DW would end up with the lion's share--DW has the invite code barrier, which would be problematic for people moving large RPG communities. But DW would definitely pick up a lot of people who don't want to have much to do with LJ anymore (and who don't have grudges against Denise).

[charmian]

Damn, that's a lot. Hmm... if icons are the most important thing, then DW doesn't have as much to offer. It does sound as if RPGs are a majority of IJ's activity, as you say.

However, it doesn't seem as though RPers use IJ because they have problems with LJ, but because of the higher icon limit, right? (and obviously it's not disliking ads on LJ, because IJ has them).

[foxfirefey]

Well, plenty of RPGs make do on LJ, so it's probably more important for some people than others. I think a bunch of RPGs do use IJ because of the higher icon limit--GJ used to be the main bastion of icon heavy RPG, with its insane icon limits, but it creaked and tottered over and died from neglect. While it was in its death throes, it specifically pointed everyone towards IJ. And, well, at this point I'm not sure offering a lot for RPGs that require lots of icons for no money is very financially viable for a business.

There are other groups on IJ, too, though--fanficcers furious about Strikethrough, and a (probably very) small group of breastfeeders angry about breastfeeding not being allowed in default icons (which means some of them would also absolutely refuse to go to DW, since Denise was head of Abuse on LJ at that time).

[charmian]

As long as it is that resource intensive, I doubt it. Maybe there is a way to change the software so it isn't that taxing (I have no idea), but otherwise, it doesn't seem to make much sense.

Huh, so are there any non-RP or fanfic fandom (or non-fandom) groups on IJ?

[foxfirefey]

Not that I know of, but that doesn't mean they don't exist--IJ can be kind of hard to explore.