(no subject)

[charmian]

If you use NoScript, you may be facing some issues with Dreamwidth: http://dw-nifty.dreamwidth.org/7596.html?style=mine

Also, a poll on paid features and some notes about the state of Dreamwidth as a business have been published on dw_biz:

http://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/4516.html


I was surprised how popular a bound book was among the people answering the poll. I guess I've never really harbored any desire to have a bound copy of any of my journals, as of my posts contain errors or outdated information etc.

I was also surprised that more people clicked that they bought a paid account because they wanted to support DW than that they did because they wanted the features. (On the other hand, the poll is not very representative of DW as a whole because obviously, free users vastly outnumber paid users, and this is not reflected in the results.) For me, it makes sense to click that option because I am not integrating my usage of DW with LJ, and thus many of those features are not useful; also, I only use one icon regularly, so that I have a hundred icons is irrelevant to me. (Actually, this is one thing I dislike about DW's pricing. I know that icons are one of the most expensive things, so I view charging $35 dollars for a package including a hundred of them is a fair price. But I wish I had an option to be a paid user, but buy fewer icons. In that respect, LJ's practice of having icon add-ons makes more sense to me.)

I think in some ways, ever since the advent of Disqus and IntenseDebate, as well as FB Connect and Twitter login, Web 2.0 services are little by little chipping away at some of the advantages of the LJ commenting system. However, no widely used service that I can think of allows a multiple icon system like Livejournal. This, I think, one of LJ's key competitive advantages.

On the last question, a plurality of users picked increased integration with other services as the most attractive feature. This was unsurprising to me, as recent discussions I've had often focused on how important integration was to DW users.


Also, it looks like Mark has created a demo of an image posting system. See it here

Comments

Poll

[frith]

I expressed interest in the book-form idea, but before I'd implement it I'd have to seriously prune my journal and rehost images from lj scrapbook to Flickr. As for why I'd buy a paid account chiefly to support DW, the options I'd lose as a free account are for the most part not that important to me, but keeping DW viable, friendly and advert-free is very important to me. I only have 3 icons and I'm sure 15 would be more than enough for me, but I _do_ like it that paid users can have up to 100 icons. I might not take advantage of all the icon slots available to me, but I do take advantage of people providing content for me to read. If small, unobtrusive gimmicks like 100 icon slots can attract entertaining content providers, I'm all for it.

Re: Poll

[charmian]

Well, the thing about the paid user stuff for me is that LJ charges $25/yr for their paid features, including 30 icons, and for $10 dollars more, you can receive a hundred icons. So if people are choosing primarily on features, then $35 dollars for paid features+100 icons isn't really that different, I think. It's just not really a gimmick or unobstrusive (a $10 price difference and 70 icon difference isn't), IMHO, but an obvious and deliberate policy. (Not that there is anything wrong with that). I get the logic of bundling and such, but it's kind of like if one cable company allows you to buy a fifty channels, and if you want to pay extra, you can get a hundred or two hundred, and another company offers the same channels, but their smallest package is a hundred channels.