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charmianIn the most recent DW news post, DW announced that unfortunately, they will not be able to implement the planned cross site reading list feature.
There is some speculation in the comments about how this happened because LJ has it in for DW, but personally, I feel the real reason is much more mundane and doesn't really have to do with DW in particular or DW's particular usage, but just because the bot DW would be using would be using up more of LJ's resources than is permitted by LJ's rules involving bots. Already LJ has a lot of problems with spam-bots, so perhaps their scrutiny of bots has even increased.
On the plus side, in the same entry DW announces that they have mostly finished the new posting page, and are moving to work on drafts/queued posts and image hosting. The latter will probably be a key feature, as this is a major feature on LJ, and a reason that I've heard people say they're not using DW (because it doesn't offer image hosting).
In general, I think the biggest threats to DW are 1) the decline of English-language LJ, and 2) the possibility that another site might solve the 'problems' that LJ (and by extension DW) solves, or that changes in how people use the internet might do away with these problems.
As for LJ, based on how they are only talking to the Russian-speaking userbase about development, I forecast that they'll ignore the English speaking side and focus on Cyrillic-services features. Depending on what features they choose to, or can't avoid, bringing over to the entire site, they might avoid another PR disaster. The English-speaking userbase will probably continue to decline, or continue to be more and more centered around comms, and personal journalers will migrate either to FB, Twitter, Wordpress, or Tumblr, depending on their personal styles.
There is some speculation in the comments about how this happened because LJ has it in for DW, but personally, I feel the real reason is much more mundane and doesn't really have to do with DW in particular or DW's particular usage, but just because the bot DW would be using would be using up more of LJ's resources than is permitted by LJ's rules involving bots. Already LJ has a lot of problems with spam-bots, so perhaps their scrutiny of bots has even increased.
On the plus side, in the same entry DW announces that they have mostly finished the new posting page, and are moving to work on drafts/queued posts and image hosting. The latter will probably be a key feature, as this is a major feature on LJ, and a reason that I've heard people say they're not using DW (because it doesn't offer image hosting).
In general, I think the biggest threats to DW are 1) the decline of English-language LJ, and 2) the possibility that another site might solve the 'problems' that LJ (and by extension DW) solves, or that changes in how people use the internet might do away with these problems.
As for LJ, based on how they are only talking to the Russian-speaking userbase about development, I forecast that they'll ignore the English speaking side and focus on Cyrillic-services features. Depending on what features they choose to, or can't avoid, bringing over to the entire site, they might avoid another PR disaster. The English-speaking userbase will probably continue to decline, or continue to be more and more centered around comms, and personal journalers will migrate either to FB, Twitter, Wordpress, or Tumblr, depending on their personal styles.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-07 04:57 am (UTC)TBH, I think to attract creators, you need to have good multimedia support, ease of use, SEO capabilities/customizability, and social media interoperability. Tumblr has really made a lot of efforts to curate content and reach out to the creative communities there, also.
I don't think that WP is really that attractive as a site, but more as a software. Tumblr, on the other hand, is really good for finding creative blogs, because they've really concentrated on making stuff findable by creating directories, etc.