Communicate, communicate, communicate.

[azurelunatic]

And then I wish that there were a place that wasn't watched like a hawk by LJ competitors that the staff could talk massively openly with LJ users.

What's really needed to regain old-school LJ user trust in LJ is open and honest communication. Unfortunately, and it sucks massively that it's so, any truly honest communication has to be out of the sorts of public forum that a competitor will be watching, and any public communication has to be incomplete.

Comments

[wibbble]

I'm more curious about who LJ thinks its competitors are. The social networking sites like MySpace, Bebo, Facebook... and Vox? The blogging sites (Blogger and... MoveableType/TypePad - are there any others?)? LJ-clones like GreatestJournal, DeadJournal? (Who'll get most of the cool toys for free anyway since LJ is GPL, and likely aren't large enough to compete on the other stuff.)

[azurelunatic]

Vox is not a competitor, as it's another 6A site; a higher degree of inter-operability is being planned. I'm seeing little things popping up in the code base that will make that possible.

I haven't the direct foggiest who all the competitors are, but I was in a random personal journal of someone who was talking about the invisible infrastructure that LJ had to build from the ground up to get the site to run as smoothly as it does. Slashdot can hit LJ with barely a blip, since LJ has enough people hitting it at once to slashdot Slashdot itself. That sort of thing is the valuable stuff, they said, and I can believe it.

[wibbble]

I know that Vox and TypePad wouldn't be considered competitors by SixApart. :op

Code created for LJ is now used on /., I think - specifically memcache.

[azurelunatic]

Spiffy-keen.

[azurelunatic]

the idea being that non-blogging businesses would love to get their hands on some of the stuff that makes LJ tick, and would happily toss LJ aside all dried up just to get their hands on the infrastructure.

[wibbble]

Ah. Again, though, most of that stuff is open sourced and actually is used by other people, and there's certainly been no shortage of talk about LJ's infrastructure in the past pre-SixApart. You could probably figure out everything you needed to know by watching the site's evolution as discussed in places like lj_dev over the years.

[azurelunatic]

Figure out, yes.

Have it neatly handed to you in a pretty little pre-coded package, no.

[wibbble]

Seems like it's already there:

http://code.sixapart.com/

There's LJ, LJ's mojo for being better than /., and LJ's Jabber server.

And, to be honest, I wouldn't think there's much to be gained from knowing LJ's super-secret architecture stuff - that doesn't help competitors as much as knowing what innovative new feature LJ's going to come up with. (And, really, there's not been much in ages that would count as innovative - everyone else has been playing catch-up for 'friends lists' to date.)

[wibbble]

And apparently Memcache gets around - and is already powering the competition. As well as Wikipedia using it, it's used at Facebook.

[azurelunatic]

*shrug*

All I know is, when admins are worried about the possibility, I don't discount it, and I'm sure they know more than what they're saying.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

Code, no, that's not a problem at all. Business plans, financials, statistics, user activity trends, future plans, etc, on the other hand...

[azurelunatic]

I stand corrected! :)

[wibbble]

That information I could see being useful, and it's the stuff that directly influences decisions on how the site operates - so it's exactly the sort of stuff that it would be nice to roll out to explain why X and Y have changed.

And I suspect that while large numbers of users complain loudly at those changes, they probably don't actually leave the site/stop paying, so there's no business reason to release potentially compromising information in order to retain them.

I suspect the whole breast feeding thing was more damaging in that regard - I know of several people that didn't leave the site, but won't give LiveJournal any more money. On the other hand, I suppose, I know of a couple of people who deleted their journals in protest, and then quietly reinstated them because they couldn't be without their friends list.

Another thing that 'you guys' could never tell us, but I'd love to know what sort of an impact that whole thing actually had on LJ/6A.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I figure Blogspot being an arm of Google implies it'll play all-devouring monster at any opportunity. Google has to constantly find more places to put ads if they want to keep their growth rate up. So that's my main suspect.

[foxfirefey]

Hrm, Google already has ads on LJ, and their Blogger stuff doesn't have ads by default that I know of--although they certainly make it verrrrry easy for people to put AdSense on their Blogspot, for obvious reasons!

[moniqueleigh]

Well, I think the trust would improve were LJ staff to be more diplomatic in how they handle public communication. Like I said before, less with the "boom! here's a change" and more with the "hey, problems were reported, and so we're changing this, but let us know if you find another problem."