Right, some further commentary on the sale of Livejournal. Mark Kraft says a lot, including his extreme doubts that the new user board will be anything more than a figleaf, and why he won't be standing for election. Elfwreck translates the PR bullshit into English.
We're now also advised that Bradley Fitzpatrick introduced a backdoor into Livejournal, allowing admins to be notified whenever a given user was talking to the system. Like that's not going to be abused by the Poutine regime, and doesn't demonstrate that the owners have never actually been bothered by such trivialities as privacy.
There's one further crime that the Poutine regime has committed, but refuses to acknowledge: the spring's cyber-war against Estonia. (Het Graun) In May, NATO was unable to deem this an attack against the alliance; it is seeing if it can change its rules.
Where next for Six Apart? August Capital wants its money back: USD 20 million was worth something in 2003, it's not worth anything like as much now. Ditching Livejournal removes a revenue stream that was becoming more trouble than it was worth, and opens the possibility for a purchase by one of the real giants. It'll give Anil Dash all the time he needs to complete his research into those peer-reviewed studies that demonstrate appreciation for Slap previews. 6A has the still-profitable Movable [sic] Type, it has the very profitable Typepad, it has the loss-leader Vox. It had RSS aggregator Rojo, but clearly bought it only for the chairman; it had Livejournal, but has sold it for a slim paper profit.
Anyway, we don't need to think about Six Apart again until they get sold, at which point the boycott transfers to their new owners. (G****e, can we interest you in another crock of shit?)
In response to our previous post, Mr. GB comments,
The guys in day-to-day charge in this case really *get* LJ, and in this case really understand what the site actually is
Metafilter sums it up: Short of coming to user's houses and beating them up, I'm not sure how Six Apart could have fucked up their ownership of LJ more badly.
Our impression is that they understand what Livejournal is for the half-million Cyrillic users, and will (at least initially) assume that what's source for the bear is source for the custard. This is certainly no less accurate than Six Apart's unshakeable assumption that their average user was a 17-year-old girl from central Merkinland, and less likely to ruffle feathers.
Mr GB continues,
The end of the decline of usership overall can it appears be linked almost exclusively to Russian growth. It's still dying in 6A controlled areas, but growing substantially in Russia from what we can tell.
Um, still falling overall. 2% growth every month for a year in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and that well-known Eastern Bloc country Singapore. Malaysia, Philippines (at least until the last couple of months), India and Italy had also been advancing up the tables, albeit at less spectacular rates. And that's just in the top 20 countries.
Their 100 day plan looks good
Here's that Three And A Half Month Plan in full:
- Improve user-friendliness of home and portal pages
- Optimize navigation
- Enhance the registration process
- Improve tagging and flagging (e.g. commercial or offensive content)
- Improve internal messaging
- Create friend discovery and invitation features
- Create widgets functionality (e.g. profile, latest posts, stats)
- Establish a clear set of policy guidelines
- Work on increasing service speed and performance, including improvements in content delivery
- Work on developing a new database architecture for new and enhanced features
- Increase certain limits for Basic and Plus accounts
From here, that's mostly nebulous and subjective claims, changing things that don't need to be changed, or things that can't possibly be delivered in the fourteen weeks allowed: a clear policy guideline is probably the one thing they will achieve, perhaps a resurrection of the Magic Number tool, but successful migration to a new database schema isn't a starter unless they've been working on it for many months beforehand.
Mr. GB also points out,
Technorati doesn't rate LJ highly for a number of reasons
...the main one being that Technorati really is a piece of rubbish. We don't know of a reliable long-term list of the most popular blogs, as opposed to day-by-day lists such as those compiled by Blogpulse. Eleven in the top 40 for the last couple of days; nothing as recently as a month ago.
What would it take to prove to us that SUP was a better caretaker than Six Apart? Resolving the basic questions of reliability would be a good start: some redundancy in data centres is a must. Preserving information that is not illegal under the governing laws is also a sine qua non; we cannot accept the involuntary censorship or concealment of matters that some might find distasteful, and banning searches for spice girls because it contains the slur spic is not a good start. Indeed, we'd appreciate some clarification of whether the prevailing law is the European Declaration of Human Rights, or the wishlist of some 18th century terrorists, or some other document entirely. We also remind SUP that the EU data protection principles appear to apply to EU customers wherever their data are held, no matter how much SUP and their predecessors pretend otherwise.
The existing censorship brew-ha-ha can be defused reasonably simply. In order to regain community acceptance, the abuse team must be professional in operation, if not in status; that requires clear and consistent operation. A policy statement has been promised almost every week since June: even the new owners have missed their deadline. It may be impossible to give a public summary of why a particular decision was taken, but it is certainly not impossible to publish the abuse squad's term of reference, and give filletted details of any cases that break new ground. Following the publication of the term of reference, it would be necessary to revise the term of service and privacy policy; if this resulted in a mass rejection of the proposition, and refunds all round, so be it. What's the cost of the refund, what's the cost of the time taken to clean up the mess?
SUP needs to treat its customers like adults. If a tattle-tale reporting system must be used, and we really don't think it should, it is necessary to provide a notification to the author. The knowledge that someone has found an item offensive may be a sufficient prod to review it.
Centralising discussion in one place is necessary to ensure that all interested parties can keep tabs on everything. Livejournal has very committed customers: splitting things across different journals makes it absurdly difficult to tap into that commitment. A weekly report to customers, discussing the ideas being batted around at head office, would be a routine of use to customers and staff.
Similarly, some insight into the process behind interface changes would be valuable. Our standing dig that Anil Dash is too busy to point out any of the peer-reviewed papers demonstrating the brilliance of Snap popups is satire: there are no such papers, for no-one has ever found hard data to demonstrate that this advertising opportunity is actually useful. Similarly, the navigation strip may be useful to some people; not only has no global opt-out been created, but no rational explanation for this decision has ever been forthcoming. Similarly, we do not believe that other changes introduced by Six Apart claiming that people found things difficult were backed up by hard data, because we never saw any data. In the soil of doubt grows the seeds of it's all about the advertising conspiracy.
No matter how much it might prefer to ignore it, SUP is bound by the Social Contract that we signed up to, and it has purchased third-hand. Six Apart's unilateral repudiation of that contract exposed their lack of moral character from the beginning; SUP will do well to restore the broken promises. We insist that SUP releases its code back as open source. We insist that SUP give feedback its due consideration; acknowledging dissent and explaining why it's doing X rather than -X is the very least it can do. And we insist that SUP remove all advertisements at the earliest possible moment. Retaining Six Apart to sell commercials does not fill us with anything that might pass as hope.
On the grounds that having the main account deleted is achieving nothing other than confusion, and having established the useful fact that deleted accounts can still read secure posts, we have restored it, at least for the moment. We have also restored the oh-so-brief RSS snippets, delayed to 10pm UK time on the day of publication; this is more likely to be a permanent change.
We reserve the right to over-react and subsequently reverse ourselves. Unlike Miss Trott and her acolytes, we don't intend to make a habit of it.
