The headlines
size accounts 14149114 224362 1.61% size accounts_active_1 512369 104001 25.47% size accounts_active_30 1732170 5527 0.32% size accounts_active_7 1077534 -4617 -0.43% userinfo total 14133183 222766 1.60% userinfo updated 8709483 98029 1.14% userinfo updated_last1 199015 48520 32.24% userinfo updated_last30 981124 1545 0.16% userinfo updated_last7 566087 -3296 -0.58%
New accounts continues to increase at around 1.75% per month; accounts_active_30 continues to fall. We've now been following these statistics each month for a year, Total accounts has compounded up at 1.75% per month; userinfo at the slightly more sedate 1.2% per month. We can also test Mark Kraft's assertion that updated_30 would inexorably fall at 1.65% per month. Compounding from last year's 1126003 to the current figure shows that we're out by almost 50,000 people. The actual fall has been 1.14% per month, barely two-thirds of the proposed figure. What's changed? The customer profile.
Sex
gender F 3671614 -262339 -6.67% gender M 1819869 -109216 -5.66% gender U 2085073 -122536 -5.55%
Total sex declared: 7576556 (-494091, -6.12%) (54% of Accounts (-4), 87% of Updated (-7).) No, we have no idea what's happened here. Males are still closing the gap on females, and whatever has happened has weeded out females disproportionately: the F/M ratio stands at 2.018 (-0.021). Last year, the ratio was 2.08.
Age
Here's a list of the ages with at least 100,000 people:
age 15 189588 -842 -0.44% age 16 336473 -4850 -1.44% age 17 537285 2688 0.50% age 18 646610 9072 1.40% age 19 695338 15019 2.16% age 20 667015 17863 2.68% age 21 606587 15208 2.51% age 22 540717 20532 3.80% age 23 430124 15745 3.66% age 24 354995 12373 3.49% age 25 294436 12287 4.17% age 26 244706 6810 2.78% age 27 248163 12663 5.10% age 28 161020 7182 4.46% age 29 134259 5605 4.17% age 30 115880 5070 4.38%
Total declaring an age: 7320835 (+205973, 2.92%) (97% of Sex (+9), 84% of Updated (+1%).) Modal age remains 19. Quartiles come at 19.0 (+0.1), 21.8 (+0.1), 26.3 (+0.1). The quartiles last year were 18.2, 20.8, and 24.5, showing that Livejournal has attracted fewer young users, and lots of older ones.
Top 20 Countries
country US 3110110 -188652 -6.07% country RU 508301 2176 0.43% country CA 271774 -12393 -4.56% country UK 240880 -9334 -3.87% country AU 115013 -3628 -3.15% country UA 63086 910 1.44% country SG 49097 1936 3.94% country PH 45842 -2999 -6.54% country DE 44002 -813 -1.85% country FI 35639 -527 -1.48% country JP 28943 -704 -2.43% country NL 23357 -781 -3.34% country BY 20597 299 1.45% country IL 18587 -194 -1.04% country NZ 16860 -502 -2.98% country BR 16594 -368 -2.22% country ES 16244 -503 -3.10% country FR 15968 -295 -1.85% country SE 11604 -247 -2.13% country IT 10855 -133 -1.23% 224 other countries: 261722
Total countries declared: 4925075 (-224274, -4.36%) (67% of those declaring an Age (-5), 65% of Sex (-2), 57% of Active (-3)). No change in the order of the top 20. The gaps beneath the 20: Italy's lead over Ireland 153 (-213), over India 290, over Malaysia 753.
Italy moves into the top 20, pushing out Ireland. This year's powerhouses: Russia, Ukraine, Singapore, Belarus are the only ones to show positive growth, but the Philippines and US show tremendous drops. Singapore has risen two places this year, Belarus is up 4.
What can we determine from this year? Livejournal's growth has come mostly from the Eastern bloc: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have risen by at least 166,000 this year; re-allocating the 43% of customers who don't give their location in proportion to those who do brings that figure up to about 290,000. That's fully a quarter of the 1.17 million new customers. The new customers are older, and are slowly correcting the long-standing gender imbalance on the site.
There appear to be two main hot-spots of people most likely to have an account on Livejournal: the traditional slew of females born in the late 1980s whose native language is English; and the new customers from the CIS, born prior to the Gorbachev era, and with no skew by sex.
Mr. Kraft also proposes a metric: active_30/total_accounts. In October 2006: 0.16305; to-day, 0.12242. In other words, the ratio of used-to-unused accounts has increased from 5:1 to 7:1. This may or may not be a bad thing.
News this month
Six Apart developed a filter by security level; its operation is restricted to paid accounts.
A single source claimed that Audioscrobbler would be going through SUP to reach the Russian market. We've not actually been able to find a second source for this story, and we wonder if Mashable should change its name to Makeupaloadable. Wouldn't be the first time...
Returning topics
JKR O'ling made a very oblique intervention into Six Apart's knicker-twist dance, suggesting that one of her principal characters deviated from the heterosexist norms proposed by the far-right zealots. Gleeful members of fandom completely failed to see that this legitimated all plots where Mr. Bumblebore crooks an eyebrow to Mr. Camman-Dursley. (Or something along those lines. Someone who's actually got past chapter 9 might give better examples than this humble spear-carrier.) More seriously, it introduces a far better defence to speculation about the sexual orientation of the various characters; if Bumblebore is (as Mrs. O'ling claims) homosexual, what are we to make of the other characters? No longer can such discussion possibly be condemned as prurient, it is now a legitimate part of literary criticism.
Further evidence of Livejournal's poor account management emerged, with examples of someone charged for services they had not requested. It is poor practice for Livejournal to keep credit card details on its servers in the first place; we half-remember a proposal from the EU to make this practice illegal.
The completely useless negligible thought waste of space thumbnail graphics for external links were foisted upon all. These are delivered by a third-party company, and can be blocked: add *spa.snap.com/* to your Adblock (or LMHosts) lists. We have long recommended the use of Noscript to entirely disable javascript on Livejournal; following this advice makes the rest redundant.
Chief Six Apart Spokesblogger Mr. Dash has still not found the time to cite the many replicable, peer-reviewed scientific studies that back up his entirely remarkable claim that people love having their browsing interrupted by this nonsense. Our meagre efforts have still failed to find any of them.
The implementation also displayed the waste of space graphics for paid users, a further violation of Six Apart's promise never to show adverts to those customers.
By revealing that someone is hovering over a particular link, it could reasonably be argued that Livejournal is releasing personally-identifiable information to a third party, in breach of its published privacy policy. This matter would have to be determined by a competent judge; in the absence of such, a California judge.
Meanwhile, we have been unable to review Snap's proposed term of service, or it's lack-of-privacy policy, for those documents require javascript. At this point...
Our Patience Snapped
Siteowners! Do you want to block Snap's shoddy piece of shite from your domain? Here's how.
The Easy Way Add the following lines to your robots.txt file:
Useragent: snapbot Disallow: / Useragent: snappreviewbot Disallow: /
Note that this requires the Snap Preview Bot (initiated when someone mouses-over a link) to respect robots.txt. The weight of evidence suggests that it does not.
The Moderate Way Add the following lines to your .htaccess file. If you don't know what you're doing, ask your ISP.
SetEnvIf User-agent snap keep_out <Limit GET POST > order allow,deny deny from env=keep_out allow from all </Limit>
This will block anything that Snap releases, so long as it calls itself Snap. The company seems to be so arrogant that it'll always do so, but we cannot be sure.
The Snarky Way Instead of the above, add the following lines to your .htaccess file. Again, if you don't know what one of those is, ask your ISP.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} snap [NC]
RewriteRule !but$ http://www.number-10.gov.uk/files/images/Old%20PMs%20-%20Margaret%20Thatcher.jpg [R,L]
(The !but$ clause re-directs every file except those ending in the word but. And, like sentences, no filename should end but) You can, of course, replace the link there to any image you like; you might want to use your own site icon, or a 1x1 blank gif, or something utterly unsavoury (as in the example above). In practice, we're using this picture, a small Forbidden sign that is hosted on Six Apart's server. Same warning that this breaks if Snap changes its useragent title.
Giving Unwillingly
Six Apart proposed a fund-raising drive in favour of public schools; this support for the wealthy is entirely consistent with its avowedly right-wing politics. The company gave prizes to the people who raised the most money to support these oh-so-needy public-school kids. We're sure that the successors to Mr. David Cameron and Mr. William Ofwales will appreciate the largesse of these dumb yankees.
What? They're using public school as a synonym for state school? Don't these people know how to use the Queen's English?
Even if this is the case, it's still a reprehensible thing to do. If society values education, then it values education enough to fund it properly through taxation and other redistributive measures. By filling what they see as a funding gap themselves, rather than lobbying for proper provision to be made from the centre, Six Apart is allowing politicians to cut taxes for everyone. If education is good for society as a whole, then the bill must be paid by society as a whole. The charity of the willing is the wrong funding mechanism.
Six Apart later proposed donations to two charities. Heifer International won the Eurovision Song Contest for Israel in 1998... oh, hang on. Heifer International is an avowedly religious group, staffed primarily by Non-Exclusive Bretheren. It purports to sell cows, goats, camels, and other livestock for delivery in less-advantaged areas. This is a minor deception: though the recipient may believe that they are donating a chicken for Namibia, the organisation drops their money into a pot and it may end up buying a pig for Indonesia. It is entirely possible that money from islamic or judaic adherents is used to purchase pigs.
Other groups have suggested that the practice of sending animals to remote regions helps turn fertile land into desert, and actively harms the health of the recipients. Former Indian minister Maneka Gandhi is quoted as saying, If people have paid money for 5,000 animals, fewer than 200 will actually get there – I can bet on it. This is cynical exploitation of animals and poor people. The organisation claims roots from the christian mythology; we have not been able to track any claim that it engages in religious advocacy, but its continued work does give ammunition to those who spout on about faith-based work replacing government support. It has recently constructed a large headquarters building next to the William J. Clinton Museum of Dresses in Arkansasas. We have not been able to connect any of the current published directors of Heifer International to Six Apart or its vulture funders. All of this information is available on the web; none of it is published on Six Apart's site.
Six Apart also proposed donations to the "National" "Novel" "Writing" Month's internal charity. Again, we have not been able to establish a direct link between Six Apart and "The Office of Letters and Light", though we find it inconceivable that there are no connections, if only at a social level, between two companies based on the earthquake fault line in St. Francisville.
These donations directly result in advertising for the various projects; for this reason, we are unable to support either. Six Apart will be able to claim back the tax it would have paid on this income; by paying USD 0.99 (€0.69), the charity will gain USD 0.99, Six Apart will increase its profits by approximately USD 0.15 (€0.10), and the tax revenue will drop by a similar amount. Support these charities, and the taxpayer suffers. (Suffering not applicable outside Failed Colonies.) It remains possible for individual taxpayers to donate directly to the causes, if they wish to support them, and reclaim this break on their own.
Social Graph News
You know when an idea is starting to lose its cool when it's the subject of a commentary piece in The Economist. The magazine ran a piece in its 20 October issue on the social network. According to the Econ,
Social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded, says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect; people want to hobnob with a chosen few, not to be spammed by random friend-requests.
This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph.
This does, of course, raise the question of why Six Apart thinks it can defy the Received Wisdom of Economists, and received economic wisdom as well. The company, along with rivals such as Fay's book (margins provided by Microsoft, killed by Ockrut according to someone who's crunched the numbers) and Myspays, reckons that the internet is like the telephone, and obeys Metcalfe's law. How powerful is the landline? Square the number of landlines to produce the possible number of connections. The Econ argues that people prefer to keep themselves to a relatively small number of friends. Is it a gamble? Only if you're staking your entire company on it.
Returning, almost inevitably, to our proposals for a better social graph, and we find this idea: persona validation. The piece goes long on the mechanics of how one would validate, for which we thank Mr. Dryburgh, but the idea of using an email address as a key to different personae pleases us. It would, after all, address the point that Mr. Pokery posed - about keeping Serious Business Network away from Play Room. That was a point that we couldn't answer last month; the persona idea appeals greatly.
Of course, this implementation still requires a central server, with all the usual problems that presents (single point of physical failure, single point of network failure, really must be located in the EU or somewhere with even more stringent privacy laws). It's not cut-and-dried, but it's a sensible start.
IT Weak, the hebdominal information technology pamphlet, proposed an Immutable Law of Identity: the most stable long-term solution discloses the least amount of information and best limits its use. Less is more. Six Apart proposes more.
