Notes from Russian LJ

[charmian]

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.

Comments

[yvi]

One of these days I am going to figure out where all these code changes go. Because something like that did not go through changelog, I think.

[charmian]

Huh, it didn't? Interesting. I wonder why.

[yvi]

It might be part of the uber-special-secret-no-one-is-allowed-to-look-at-it code, but that seems doubtful to me.

But now that I think about it, where do the changes go that first go live on the Cyrillic services, but are later transferred to the other servers? Any ideas?

[sophie]

I believe it did go there, actually.

The repositories themselves can be seen here:

* livejournal (free code): http://code.livejournal.org/trac/livejournal/browser/trunk
* ljcom (non-free): http://code.livejournal.org/trac/ljcom/browser/trunk

Neither of them have an htdocs/classifieds/ directory, which suggests tht it got created in ljcomint, the private one that nobody can look at. That also explains why it might not have been in the changelog.

[janinedog]

Pretty much all integrations with third parties end up in ljcomint (the private repository). I guess it's a way to keep the details of a partnership between just LJ and the other party, and no one will ever need to look at that code anyway since partnerships are definitely a site-specific thing.

As for the Cyrillic question, it depends on the feature. There's not a particular repository it has to go into or anything. The page/feature just has to check to see if the logged-in user is a Cyrillic user or not.

[foxfirefey]

...this seems like one of those things that seems like it might be great and successful for the Russian side of LJ and just overwhelmingly mediocre for the US side.

[yvi]

And most other countries - there are an overwhelming 12 ads for the 200,000 inhabitants city I live in.

[foxfirefey]

Well, in Russia LJ is site #10 according to Alexa. OLX isn't anywhere near that popular, but partnering with LJ alone could rocket its popularity and thereby end up making it useful.

It is not currently all that useful in the US in my area. Most of the ads in Seattle seem to be spam or posted by an automated free-ad-site poster, and it's slow to load.

What's more, many LJ users are conducting commerce that isn't local; OLX is geared towards localized commence.

I'm going to assume they're going to do something that ISN'T an iframe on a page at some point, because it is so painful to navigate.

[charmian]

Huh, I wonder... Is OLX the dominant classifieds supplier in Russia? It seems really odd that their implementation seems to be restricted to an iframe, unless it is more elaborate for the Cyrillic users.

[foxfirefey]

Probably--I realized that I should be looking for olx.ru, and it's around rank 143 in Russia. OLX also has staff in Russia.