LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the open source^[1] server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community. LiveJournal's differences from other blogging sites include its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to, but pre-dating, Friendster and MySpace. Danga Interactive, the company which provides the LiveJournal service, is based in San Francisco, California.^[2]

LiveJournal was started in March 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.^[2] In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.

Features

The most distinguishing feature of LiveJournal is the "friends list", which gives the site a strong social aspect in addition to the blog services. The friends list provides various syndication and privacy services as described below.

LiveJournal allows users to customize their accounts in several ways. The S2 programming language allows journal templates to be modified by members. Users may upload graphical avatars, or "userpics", which appear next to the username in prominent areas as it would on an Internet forum. Paid account holders are given full access to S2 management and more userpics, as well as other features.

Each user also has a "User Info" page, which contains a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources), and lists of friends, interests, communities, and even schools which the user has attended in the past or is currently attending.

LiveJournal also allows "voice posts" to their paid and sponsored users, where one can call into the system and record an entry.

Currently LiveJournal has five account levels: free (comprising approximately 95% of the network); sponsored with advertising; "early adopters" who were registered prior to 2000; paid; and permanent. Permanent accounts are normally not available to the "average user"; there have been occasional sale days or special offers, but such sales are not guaranteed in the future.

"Sponsored with Advertising" accounts, whose status may be turned on or off at any given time by the (free) user, do not cost anything extra (the costs being supplemented by allowing advertising) and allow for some of the features normally reserved for paid and permanent accounts. These include more user icons (up to fifteen, as opposed to six for free accounts) and space on LiveJournal's own image-hosting site (one free gigabyte per user). The official name of the status was originally "Sponsored+", but was changed to "Plus".

Social networking

The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternary (with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can "friend" the other without reciprocation. On LiveJournal, "friend" is also used as a verb to describe listing someone as a friend.

The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term; however, because the term "friend" is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz, as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used in this way; this conflict is discussed in greater detail below.

A user's list of friends (friends list, often shortened to flist) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users. Generally, "friending" allows the friends of a user to read protected entries and causes the friends' entries to appear on the user's "friends page". Friends can also be grouped together in "friends groups", allowing for more complex behavior in both of these features.

Privacy

LiveJournal provides an option intended to reduce the chances of search engines indexing a journal; however, the only way to make it completely impossible for such indexing to occur is setting the entry security to "friends only" or higher when first posting the entry. If an entry is first posted publicly, and then edited to reflect a higher security level, it may have already been indexed by a search engine in the time between the security edit. The popular "friends only" security option, which has since been adopted by Xanga and MySpace, hides a post from the general public so that only those on the user's friends list can read it. Some users keep all their posts friends-only. LiveJournal also allows users to create custom user groups within their group of friends to further restrict who can read any particular post, and to allow easy reading of subsets of a user's friends list.

LiveJournal additionally has a "private" security option which allows users to make a post that only the poster can read, thus making their LiveJournal a private diary rather than a blog. While anyone is able to see if and when entries have been made to the journal on the Calendar page, they will not be able to view these entries.

Some sociologists describe this system as an online gated community, similar to Orkut or aSmallWorld^{[citation needed]}, but LiveJournal is far more complex;^{[original research?]} any individual post can be public, restricted to some custom group, or entirely private. Anyone can read public posts.

Users may restrict who can comment on their posts in addition to who has the ability to read their posts. Comments on a given entry may be allowed from anyone who can read the entry, or restricted. Commenting may be restricted by disabling commenting altogether or by screening comments. Screened comments are visible only to the original posters until the journal owner approves the comment. These restrictions can be applied to just anonymous users, users who aren't listed as a friend, or everyone. The IP address of commenters can be logged as well if the journal owner wishes to enable it.

The addition of a 'friend of' listing under user profiles caused controversy, as many people are unable to consent to the friend option, and do not want certain users listed on their profile page. This was amended by allowing users to block who is listed under 'friend of' by removing banned users from the list.^{[citation needed]} An additional option allows users to hide their 'friend of' list from public view, but leaves the list visible to the user. In this case, only the friends list is shown. When 'friend of' is allowed, journal accounts who have friended the user and who are also friended are listed in neither 'friend of' nor 'friend', but rather a third category, 'mutual friends'. This was eventually made a separate option, like the 'friend of' list, and reworded so that the lists would have to be selected to include them in a profile, rather than to select an option to remove them.

LiveJournal lists that users can hide communities from their profile page by not friending them (friended communities are 'watched') and by either banning the community from posting in their journal (which has no effect since they can't anyway, but does remove them from the 'member of' list) or by removing the 'friend of' list, which removes the 'member of' list in addition to the 'friend of' list.

The LiveJournal FAQ is misleading in that the only private communities are ones the user does not have posting access to.^{[original research?]} All communities members have posting access to are listed in the 'full' mode of a profile view, which is accessible to everyone. As most communities automatically grant posting privileges to members, the only way to remove a community from this list is either to contact a maintainer in each community one at a time and request they remove your posting access, or quit the community. Users cannot remove their own posting access unless they are a maintainer, so only a maintainer of a community can guarantee their own privacy regarding the community. Even in this case, if a community has multiple maintainers, another maintainer can reenable posting access to make the group show up on the full mode of a user's profile. ^{[dubious – discuss]}

Community

User interaction

As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries and create a message board-style thread of comments — each comment can be replied to individually, starting a new thread. All users, including non-paying users, can set various options for comments: they can instruct the software to only accept comments from those on their friends list or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts). They can also screen various types of comments before they are displayed, or disable commenting entirely. Users can also have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address.

In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group journals, dubbed "communities" (frequently abbreviated as comms). Anyone who joins a community can make posts to it as they would on a regular journal; communities also have "maintainers", ordinary users who run the community and oversee membership and moderation.

Some areas of LiveJournal rely heavily on user contributions and volunteer efforts.^[3] In particular, the LiveJournal Support area is run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Similarly, the website is translated into other languages by volunteers, although this effort is running down due to a perceived lack of involvement from the LiveJournal administration.

The development of the LiveJournal software has seen extensive volunteer involvement in the past. In February and March 2003, there was even an effort, nicknamed the Bazaar, to boost volunteer performance by offering money in return for "wanted" enhancements or improvements.^[4] The Bazaar was intended to follow a regular monthly pay-out scheme, but it ended up paying out only once, after which it was neglected without a word from the management until about one year later when it was shut down.

Nowadays, voluntary contributions to the software are considered for inclusion less and less as the company has acquired more and more paid employees who focus on the organization's commercial interests. This has led to the formation of several forks, many of which introduce new features that users would like to see at LiveJournal, especially features that are brought up repeatedly in LiveJournal's own suggestions journal.

In some cases legal and administrative concerns have led LiveJournal to prohibit some people from volunteering.

Demographics

As of May 30, 2007, 13,034,151 accounts have been created.^[5] Of those users who provided their date of birth, the majority were in the 15-24 age group. Of those who specified a gender, two thirds were female.

LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries (although there is a language selection feature), and the United States has by far the most LiveJournal users among users who choose to list a location. There is also a sizable Russian contingent, as many Russians have turned to LiveJournal as their primary blogging engine. The following are rounded figures as of February 7, 2007 (based on the information listed by the users):

1. 3,290,716 — United States
2. 429,628 — Russian Federation
3. 278,147 — Canada
4. 238,299 — United Kingdom
5. 112,978 — Australia
6. 49,636 — Ukraine
7. 43,763 — Philippines
8. 40,772 — Germany
9. 39,651 — Singapore
10. 32,643 — Finland

The following is a breakdown of United States users, by state, as of May 30, 2007:

1. 556,355 — California
2. 355,344 — Florida
3. 335,444 — New York
4. 278,553 — Michigan
5. 250,697 — Texas

These figures only include accounts where the country information is public.

Notable LiveJournals and users

Frank the Goat

Frank the Goat is LiveJournal's mascot. Frank is treated like an actual living being by much of the LiveJournal userbase, and his brief "biography" as well as his "journal" reflect this.

Sometimes, callers to LiveJournal's Voice Post service are informed "Frank the Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly.^[6]

Recently, web cartoonist Ryan Estrada has made comics about Frank, updated every Wednesday on the Frank: The Comic Strip community on LiveJournal. As of this date, the community has roughly 8,000 members, and is watched by more than 7,000 LiveJournal users.

Controversies and criticism

Invite system

From September 2, 2001 until December 12, 2003, the growth of LiveJournal was checked by an "invite code" system. This curbing of membership was necessitated by a rate of growth faster than the server architecture could handle. New users were required to either obtain an invite code from an existing user or buy a paid account (which reverts to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system serendipitously reduced abuse on the site by deterring people from creating multiple throw-away accounts. The invite code system was lifted after a number of major improvements to the overall site architecture.

Elimination of the invite code system was met with mixed feelings and some opposition. LiveJournal's management pointed out that the invite code system was always intended to be temporary.^[7]

The word "friend"

The dual usage of "friend" as those one reads and those one trusts doesn't necessarily match the definition of the word used in everyday speech. Even the individual users on a user's friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships, general interest, and courtesy (a user friending back someone who friended them). Sometimes a friends list represents something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection, a puzzle or even nothing.^[8]

The fact that "friend" is used, without qualification, to describe vastly different things in the LiveJournal community is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. This is intensified by the fact that friending and defriending (adding or removing another user from your Friends list) is as simple as clicking a button, while real-life friendships are formed and unmade over longer periods of time.^[9] Since creating a friend relationship on LiveJournal does not require permission or action on the part of anyone but a single user, any user can friend any other user.

On April Fool's Day 2004, the LiveJournal staff pulled a prank on all users by changing the terms "friend" and "friend of" to "stalking" and "stalked by".^[10] Though many users wanted to keep these terms, it caused controversy, particularly with those who had been victims of stalking.

In the Russian LiveJournal community, the word френд (friend, an English borrowing) is often used to describe this relationship instead of the native Russian word "друг" that translates to "friend."

Abuse team decisions

As LiveJournal has grown, it has had to deal with issues involving the content it hosts. Like most web logging hosts, it has adopted a basic Terms of Service [4]. The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as spamming, copyright violation, harassment, etc. LiveJournal created an abuse team and processes to handle claims about violations of the Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the law, and other issues.

If the abuse team determines that a violation has occurred, the user will be either required to remove the infringing material (as in the case of copyright violations)[5]; the journal will be suspended until such time as the material can be removed (e.g., posting of home addresses or other various contact information of another); or, in cases of severe or multiple violations, the journal will be suspended (e.g., account hijacking, multiple instances of copyright violation, child pornography).[6] The offending user is notified by email of any journal suspension or, if any offending material must be removed, the user is given a deadline for its removal. When a journal is suspended, it effectively removes from sight everything the user has written on LiveJournal, including comments in other people's journals; however, the user is able to download the material while suspended. Those suspended users who have paid for LiveJournal's service do not have payments refunded.

A small controversy arose in November 2004 when a policy document used by the abuse team was leaked to a group of its critics before it was due to be released. The policy document has since been officially released.^[11]

A controversy arose when users complained after an unknown number of users were asked to remove default user pictures containing images of breast feeding that were considered inappropriate as they contained a view of nipples or areolae.^[12] The incident attracted the attention of breast feeding advocacy groups such as Pro-Mom^[13] who publicized the issue to gain larger media awareness. LiveJournal responded by changing the FAQ on appropriate content for default user pictures. The current FAQ 111 says that nudity is not appropriate: the original FAQ 111 said that graphic sexual content was not appropriate. Breastfeeding pictures were not restricted by the original FAQ, but are under the new FAQ.^[14] It should be noted that breastfeeding pictures are still allowed as user pictures that may be manually chosen while posting but may not be the default.

LiveJournal and advertisements

In April of 2006, LiveJournal announced it was introducing a new user type that gave free users some of the features available to paid members in exchange for ad sponsorship. This user type was initially called Sponsored+, but was later renamed to Plus.

This announcement was met with a whirlwind of controversy. Between April 2004 and January 2005, one of LiveJournal's Social Contract promises stated the site would, "Stay advertisement free." The Social Contract went on to say, "It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages."^[15].

Another ad-related controversy occurred when ads for Kpremium began installing malware and triggering pop-up ads on users' computers, against the LiveJournal ad guidelines.^[16] LiveJournal responded by removing the advertisement from the website and issuing an apology to its users.^[17]

Licensing in Russia

In October 2006 came news that LiveJournal had licensed its Russian community to the Russian publisher Sup-Fabrik,^[18] a startup financed by Russian oligarch Alexandr Mamut. The move was poorly received by some Russian LJ members.^[19]

Strikethrough 07

In May 2007, LiveJournal suspended approximately 500 accounts and communities, causing what news.com referred to as a "revolt" from "thousands of LiveJournal customers",^[20] after a number of activist groups, including one named Warriors for Innocence, reported pedophilic material on its website. ^{[20] [21] [22] [23]} Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page).

According to Six Apart chairman and chief executive Barak Berkowitz, "We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up".^[20] In a subsequent post to the LiveJournal news community, he apologized, discussed some of the circumstances behind the suspensions, and indicated that the suspended journals would be reviewed and potentially brought back online.

Most of the backlash has been from fan fiction writers whose communities and personal journals were among those suspended, seemingly only because they list interests such as "incest" or "non-con" (short for non-consensual).^[20] Although these communities may not encourage illegal behavior, it has been reported that there was no further investigation into the content of these journals.^[24]

Beyond merely fan communities, many were initially upset that communities entirely unrelated to anything but the discussion, sometimes therapeutic and other times literary of rape or child molestation were among those suspended.^[20]

On May 31,2007, Berkowitz released a statement to the LiveJournal news community announcing that SixApart was currently in the process of unsuspending about half of suspended journals. The journals being reinstated fell into fandom or fiction categories or were journals that were suspended for problems related only to the contents of their profiles. In an earlier interview with news.com,^[25] he had stated that he would be "shocked" if "more than a dozen" journals would be reinstated.

Sale to Six Apart

LiveJournal's parent company, Danga Interactive, was initially formed and held entirely by Brad Fitzpatrick. However, as LiveJournal's popularity gained, Fitzpatrick was approached by multiple parties to sell the popular journaling service.^{[citation needed]} He initially resisted many of these offers, not wanting his pet project (which he has characterized as his "baby") in the hands of those who did not understand the site's core principles — reliance on paid memberships to fund site operations, the absence of advertising, the volunteer support model, and LiveJournal's support of the free software movement. Nonetheless, as the administrative aspect of LiveJournal began to consume more of Fitzpatrick's time, which he would have rather spent working on the site's technical workings, he began to take the acquisition offers more seriously.^{[citation needed]}

Finally, Fitzpatrick was approached by Ben and Mena Trott, co-founders of Six Apart, who gained his trust and seemed to understand LiveJournal's core principles.^{[citation needed]} He felt that a sale to Six Apart would allow him to focus on technical aspects of the site, while Six Apart's usability and design expertise could improve LiveJournal. Six Apart was interested in buying Danga and LiveJournal to complement their other blogging products.

Community reaction

Rumors of Danga's impending sale to Six Apart were first reported by Business 2.0 journalist Om Malik in his blog, on January 4 2005.^[26] The rumor immediately spread, as users began to speculate (and some panic) about the prospect of the sale of LiveJournal's parent company.^{[27][28][29][30]} By the next evening, speculation of major changes, including a rumor that LiveJournal would require non-paying users to purchase memberships, had caused enough users to backup their journals to impact the site's performance.^[31] A few hours later, Fitzpatrick confirmed the sale, and insisted the site's core principles would not be discarded by the new ownership.^[32] He also stressed that he and other Danga employees would still continue to manage LiveJournal and that he had determined that Six Apart was committed to the site's core principles before selling.

While the userbase was generally supportive of Fitzpatrick's decision, a few have questioned the deal, objecting to Six Apart's sale of proprietary software, or objecting to changes in LiveJournal's "Guiding Principles" document.^[33] In addition, some users had developed a trust of Fitzpatrick, but felt that the sale of Danga to an outside company meant that Fitzpatrick was not ultimately in control of the site.

Fitzpatrick's supporters offered rebuttals to many of these arguments.^[34] They noted that the bulk of the code running LiveJournal at the time of the acquisition would continue to be open source, as it was licensed under the GPL. Furthermore, it was noted, most of the changes to the "Social Contract"/"Guiding Principles" document were minor rewordings to prevent legal problems.^{[citation needed]} (The document was never a binding legal contract.)^{[citation needed]}

Others argued that Fitzpatrick, as the sole owner of Danga Interactive, had every right to sell the site, without first consulting the users.

Finally, Fitzpatrick himself noted he was growing tired of the administrative aspects of the site — to the point where he had contemplated shutting down the service — and "I knew I would've shut down the site on my own if I didn't get help."^[35].

Other sites running the LiveJournal engine

The software running LiveJournal is open source and primarily written in Perl. Because of this, many other communities have been designed using the LiveJournal software. However, with the exception of DeadJournal, GreatestJournal and Blurty, these tend to be unstable and short-lived. An example of this is the August 2004 closing of uJournal, which temporarily left approximately 100,000 accounts without hosting before the content was moved to AboutMyLife. Another, slowly growing but not dying, journal is InsaneJournal, which has been around since 2001. A small service (though popular in fandom) is Journalfen, which is only for non-minor fans of movies, television, music and other forms of media entertainment.

• DeadJournal: On May 1, 2001, an IRC user with the screen name BleuLlama dared Frank Precissi (DeadJournal username scsi) to create a DeadJournal website, as a parody of the LiveJournal blogging service,^[36] the server code of which had just been made open source.^[37] Precissi accepted the dare and promptly set up the server code, which was running by the end of the month.^[38] DeadJournal immediately adopted a completely contrasting attitude to that of LiveJournal, proclaiming itself as the darker, less friendly alternative, and catering specifically to angry and/or depressed individuals. After LiveJournal, DeadJournal was the second site to use the LiveJournal server code.^[39] In its early years, the site often suffered technical errors due to hardware or software failures, resulting in downtime and even data loss.^[40] Later, upgrades frequently placed DeadJournal on new equipment, such as larger and faster web slaves and load balancers. Today, DeadJournal is stable, experiencing unplanned downtime only very rarely. After experiencing rapid, uncontrolled growth in its first few months of operation, DeadJournal followed suit with LiveJournal, instituting an invite code system. Unlike LiveJournal, DeadJournal still maintains its invite code system. Though many users see this as an inconvenience, DeadJournal owner and administrator Frank Precissi, among other users, believes it helps maintain the integrity of the service.^[41] As of January 28, 2007, DeadJournal had 492,388 users.

• GreatestJournal: As of May 25, 2007, there were 1.8 million users and communities. It was founded on September 2, 2003 under the url unlimitedrpg.com, offering a journal site for role-playing. It later changed its name to greatestjournal.com and opened to anyone, as an alternative to LiveJournal, offering for free many of the features which LiveJournal offers only to paying users, such as extra icons, voice posts, and unlimited styles. GreatestJournal operates on LiveJournal's open source server software, but with add-ons such as phpBB forums, video hosting, and a photo gallery called GJPix. In February 2005 one of the biggest ISPs in the world, ThePlanet, started sponsoring the site's hosting. On June 20, 2005, the site surpassed 1,000,000 users. In August 2005 a new video section was launched. GreatestJournal.com allows the indexing of content it fully republishes from RSS feeds of other sites (e.g. boingboing.greatestjournal.com).

• Blurty: As of May 1, 2007, Blurty had 958,891 members. Blurty also runs on the open-source LiveJournal code and was created in 2002. However, it differs from the other journal sites in its rule that users must be 18 or older to join.

References

See also

• Timeline of LiveJournal
• List of social networking websites

External links

• LiveJournal.com