Charmian's Journal

http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8869996.html (and other entries)

LJ seems to be developing "Facebook Integration." What exactly this is is unclear, but it would suspect it has to do with allowing FB identities to interact with LJ in a manner similar to OpenID identities. I wonder if such a thing will be widely utilized? How many people do, after all, crosspost their personal Ljs to FB?

Or is the intended audience more the communities and public journals with large audiences? For people who use their livejournal/lj comms as general blogs in a manner similar to Wordpress, this may indeed be useful. I'm not sure how useful this would be to a Russian audience, though. According to Google Trends, FB is less popular than LJ in Russia. FB is also far outclassed by Russian social networks.

Or, could the integration involve even more than that? FB does have extensive APIs with many uses.

Speaking of Facebook, it has reached 500 million users.

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/49109184.html

ONTD announces a marketing and advertising partnership with Buzzmedia, which also does this for other well-known gossip blogs. The most interesting thing in the copy is that the site claims to have 2.6 million monthly users, which must include non-logged in lurkers, because this is more than the number of LJ active users (people with accounts, that is). The press release claims that LJ has a worldwide audience of 28 million monthly, which agrees with Google Trends. However, Google Trends also claims that the US monthly uniques is only 6.1 million (Google trends says that Russian traffic is 11 million). If this is so, then ONTD might make up a substantial portion of US traffic.

In other news, Blogetry was not in trouble for anything to do with copyright, but because some terrorist organizations had signed up for accounts and were producing articles like 'Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.' The FBI says that they didn't, however, order the entire blogging site closed down, and that the hosting provider did it on their own, which is backed up by Burst.NET's statements.

LJ forces a comm to declare itself Explicit Adult Content, then after complaints from the comm owners, changes it to Adult Concepts.

http://ineptshieldmaid.dreamwidth.org/192601.html

While I don't really approve of LJ's policy, although I do acknowledge they are within their rights to have such a policy, I'm confused as to why anyone is surprised by this. This has been LJ's stated policy for a long time (possibly ever since the flag was introduced?), and just a while ago, the exact same thing happened to fanficrants.

And, although people are referencing the ToS, the FAQs clearly state that this is the policy:

http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=281
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=196

Via yvi, LJ may be purging inactive accounts, which (at least according to code; no official LJ announcement has been made at this time, and it is not clear whether this code will definitely be put into effect or whether it represents the final code) appears to target accounts which have never been posted in and have been not logged into, posted, or commented in for two years.

After being notified, owners of these accounts have fifteen days before the accounts are deleted.

I doubt this will affect current users much, but probably some vocal desirers of usernames will be somewhat mollified, as one of the most requested things is the deletion of inactive accounts. (Though these folk would probably prefer that even inactive accounts w/ entries would be deleted. IIRC this was done on Insanejournal.)

Someone sent me a message about how the LJ has decided to discontinue the LJ Advisory Board.

More info can be found here: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_advisory/1840.html

According to the post, they "have outgrown the ability to rely upon a part-time board of volunteer advisors to make efficient business-critical decisions." (Eh? Has there been that much growth?)

It always seemed to me that it was pretty much a waste of time and effort: the elections were circuses, the board didn't seem to meet that often, and LJ users really cannot be accused of failing to provide detailed feedback on a variety of issues, so I never really understood the need for a board.

Been busy, scarce for awhile for various reasons. Anyway, saw something interesting:

LJ appears to be integrating some aspect of Offerpal. (See here, here, here, for example) There appear to be many ways to use Offerpal, so it isn't really clear what it's going to consist of, but it appears to be a payment option.

Offerpal was previously involved in the Scamville controversy, where Techcrunch reported on fraudulent and misleading offers in Facebook games. This led to the then-CEO of Offerpal being replaced by a new CEO, who promised to end these practices.

However, it seems that they still need to improve on this score. Be very, very careful about entering in your cell phone number on the net w/r/t virtual currency offers.

Regarding this comment which I linked in an earlier post.

The person who made the comment has responded, explaining their remarks, in a comment to that post.

To summarize it, the person says that they heard from a volunteer that the volunteer looked up someone's history of support requests in the course of investigating a support request that the user did not feel was adequately dealt with. However, this does not seem to me to necessarily indicate any kind of abuse of power.

Also, to reiterate something: all public posts (unless I make it technically impossible to do so, like turning off comments) are open to comments from anyone (that is, unless you're a spammer/leaving OT/inappropriate comments).

Regarding the situation with the LJ staff member posted about earlier:

The person whose entry was commented on by the LJ staff member, vulva, discussed the situation further here, and also pasted in the response LJ had to her complaint.

(BTW, apparently the comment the staff member left was "hi. *eyes open wide*
I'm watching." On an entry with a photograph of the journal owner and another person. That's not only breaking whatever policy they have of commenting on user journals, but damn creepy also.)

I'm somewhat surprised that LJ took an entire month to given any kind of response to a matter as serious as staff misconduct (as even in LJ's version of events, the staff member acted wrongly). Anyway, from this new info, what is definitely known is that when the staff member commented on the entry, its security status was public; however, it was not supposed to be so, according to the journal owner, and was still locked a week prior to the commenting.

Also, LJ's response to her letter seems to reference an entirely different entry, because the entry in question never had a 'friends only' banner, and the friends-only banner post appears to be still public on her journal.

Anyway, what I still find very bizarre is that multiple staff members witnessed this incident. Especially since this was known to multiple staff members at the time of the incident, why is it that it still took LJ a month to respond? It appears that LJ only got around to sending a detailed response after vulva commented in the news post.

Been busy translating some stuff, although I am planning to put up some links about the latest Facebook events.

Hmm, at this point a lot of my thoughts about LJ's latest scandal regarding the Driving Revenue/Outboundlinks stuff can be summed up by this animated .gif. Here are tips on dealing with the issue, in case you haven't heard already.

Also, there's a comm on DW dedicated to creating exclusive content for DW for three weeks. Since most of the content in this blog is original and not cross-posted to anywhere else, I guess you could say I'm already 'participating.' Anyhow, this campaign makes me wonder whether it is true that one of the impediments to DW growth is that there is a dearth of original content on DW?

Yesterday, the LJ ops team attempted to move ONTD to another server, but were unfortunately unsuccessful. Also, in case you were wondering, ONTD itself isn't the source of the problems with LJ's operation, but more of a symptom; so ONTD sinking into the sea or whatever wouldn't really solve the real problem LJ faces, which is something with its architecture. Having no technical expertise in these matters, it's impossible for me to know how serious these problems really are, or how long it will take for them to resolve them.

This is pure speculation, but from what stats I can see, it doesn't really seem like the overall traffic of LJ has hugely exploded (especially from peak levels in the past), so could what it be is that the distribution of LJ traffic is what has altered? In other words, comparable numbers of people are accessing LJ, but in a more concentrated way? As people who have small scale journals decamp to FB (or Tumblr, etc), perhaps LJ usage has become far more community-oriented. (Well, some ONTD posters think this may be so)

Also, Kyle Cassidy has a post up about interstitial ads which play sounds on LJ, and why this is happening: http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/591298.html (3rd party ad-networks, basically)

Anyway, in other social networking news, AOL is going to sell Bebo, or shut it down. Bebo, for those of you who don't know, is a social network with about 14 million monthly visitors which has mostly young people in the UK as its main audience, and it was ill-conceivedly bought by AOL awhile back for far too much ($850 million).

Although it's unclear what's going to happen, some tax experts say that entirely shutting down Bebo may make more financial sense for AOL. That's pretty tough for all of the users. 0_o In the comments, someone claiming they are a former Bebo employee has some choice words.
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