Questions! Answers! Dancing robots! Okay, not the robots.
And my turn!
* coffeecaptain asked, "Any chance we could see the financial statements?"
Well, sure, but then I'd have to kill you to prevent top-secret information from leaking.
Seriously, though: we're a privately-held company, so we don't have to share our financial statements with the public. Sure, we could, but that'd be like hanging up a sign for our competitors saying "free eats!" We'd love to be able to be more open with you guys -- in a general way, even without giving specifics -- but it would seriously hurt us to do so, because our competitors are always watching, and they go to a lot of trouble to figure out what they can about what we're up to. I like to think that we're one of the most transparent companies out there, still -- we work our little tushes off to tell you guys as much as we can about what we're doing and why we're doing it.
Shameless plug here: friend lj_biz, where I'm doing a series of posts about the reasoning behind a lot of our decisions! Many of the questions everyone asked will be covered in more depth in posts I've planned for the next few months. It's like you guys read my mind.
* igz00 asked, "How many users does LJ have? Any way of listing active users (posts within the last 6 months or something)?"
We actually do make some of our statistics public! (At least, as much as we can without giving too much away.) You can see the stats page, which updates every night.
* 7rin asked, "Do you keep track of all the "let's sue LiveJournal" suggestions?"
Any online provider gets threats of lawsuits all the time. Some of them are serious, and some of them are people who think that waving around their internet lawyer will get them whatever they want. We handle them all based on what the law, our Terms of Service, and our policies say, and we're very careful. I can't say much more without giving our lawyers hives. :)
* clare_dragonfly asked, "Are the options for gender selection ever going to broaden?"
Oh, this is a can of worms, and every time we talk about it, we wind up accidentally offending someone -- so please take this answer in the spirit it's offered, and I apologize if I accidentally give offense.
I've heard a bunch of very good reasons for expanding the selection of "gender" options on the drop-down selection. "Gender" and "sex" are two entirely different things, and I know that many transgendered and intersexed LJ users wish that there were a better way of representing their self-identity.
There are a few reasons why we haven't made this change. First, we don't actually display that field anywhere -- it's not visible on your profile or anywhere in your journal, only in aggregate form on the statistics page, and we only ask for it because a lot of people -- reporters, potential business partners, etc -- like to know the very rough breakdown of our userbase. (It's also useful for social researchers, etc.) Second, whenever we start talking about expanding the options, we quickly run into the problem of: which other options do we offer? No matter what we do, we'll accidentally leave out or offend someone. Third, we do offer an "unspecified" option, which we think is slightly better than just the usual female/male binary reduction, and there's plenty of room in your userinfo and interests -- which are visible -- to fully explain.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of ever broadening the selection -- it's always possible. But we've never really found a solution that will satisfy everyone, and so we sort of stick to the status quo until we can find a more satisfying solution -- because we think that our current options are, while certainly not perfect, better than making a change that will offend or confuse more people. We know that a percentage of our userbase doesn't fit into the binary gender construct, and we think that's just another awesome sign of the diversity on LJ. We don't want to force anyone into making an uncomfortable choice or self-identifying in a way that they don't feel fits them, which is why we'll always at the very least offer the "unspecified" option.
If we do make any changes -- and I'm certainly not promising anything! -- we'd probably offer a simple "other" option, rather than getting into all the many variations available. And it's certainly possible we'll do that in the future -- we've been talking about it in conjunction with some of our future improvements. But for right now, we think that offering "unspecified" and the option to clarify in interests or userinfo is a reasonable compromise for the time being.
* makesmewannadie asked, "Can I get a guesstimate of how much of your population is primarily here because they're involved in media fandom? I know you don't poll on things like that, but just, the view from the top, as it were."
Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to start guessing -- and I'm involved in LJ fandom myself! There's a huge problem with "how do you define fandom and who's involved in it". We have a lot of really fascinating, thriving subcultures on LJ, fandom included, and I'm a sociologist at heart -- I love poking into them, seeing how they work, how they've adapted LJ's tools to their needs, etc. We're actually starting some intensive internal research into those subcultures, to see what we can do to help improve their experiences! (Without negatively affecting the site for others, of course, which is always a careful balancing act.) So the answer is -- I don't really know percentages or numbers, but there are a lot of groups (like fandoms) drawn to LJ for the things we offer, and we love seeing what they do and how they do it.
* gilliannegarret asked, "Why so many changes after Six Apart said there would be no changes?"
Let's be accurate here -- Six Apart didn't promise no changes at all. That would have been silly, because a website or a community that doesn't change and grow will stagnate and die horribly. (We don't want that. I don't think you guys do either.) What Mena said when we first announced the acquisition was that Six Apart wouldn't make changes just for the sake of change -- the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" idea.
Problem is, a lot of people didn't realize just how badly some things on LJ were broken. We (as in the group of people who worked for Danga before the acquisition) always knew that there were rough edges and bad spots, but we never had the resources to fix them. There were other features we always wanted to add (our notifications system being a prime example) but we never had the resources to program them. We had plenty of technical/hardware infrastructure, but Six Apart gave us a lot of the business infrastructure we were lacking to make all of that easy -- they let us hire people who specialized in the 'business' stuff, so our engineers could get back to engineering, as well as hiring more engineers to share around the workload.
As a side note, and because this is as good a place as any to say it: I'm personally really bummed out by all the people who think Six Apart is the devil incarnate, or all the people who keep talking as though there's an "us" and a "them". Sure, there's "people who were here before Six Apart" and "people who came on after", but I can promise you there's no secret cabal of people in a shadowy back room steering LJ in the direction "they" want it to go. Out of all the places I've worked, Six Apart is the best for fostering team discussion and input on decisions and direction, and everyone -- whether they used to work for Danga or came on afterward -- loves LJ and all its little quirky habits.
The decisions we make -- and I'm deliberately not saying "Six Apart" there, because come on, guys, it's been twenty months, and 'they' is 'us' by now -- are motivated by wanting LJ to be a viable service one year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. Change is part of that, whether it be new features, fixing old features, or just improving the navigation and workflow of the site so people don't get so completely lost when they visit us. I know some of our decisions look weird from the outside, but there's a reason for all of them, and when we screw up, we fix it as fast as we can.
Personally, I've been here four years now, and I still think Six Apart is one of the best things to happen to LJ. It hasn't been a totally smooth ride, but nothing ever is, and we've been able to do some really cool things that we wouldn't have otherwise had the resources to do. And come on, let's not pretend that we of the old Danga days never got things spectacularly wrong, either. I can name quite a few examples. :)
somefan asked, "Has the rise of Myspace hurt LiveJournal at all?"
Only in that every time we announce a change, people in News comments invariably complain that we're turning into MySpace ;)
Seriously, though -- we're not MySpace. They're very good at what they do, but what they do and what we do aren't the same thing at all. MySpace is a social networking site, and LJ is a journaling site with some social networking features. Social networking isn't our primary goal, just like journaling isn't theirs. So really, it's like comparing apples and oranges -- people want to compare LJ and MySpace because people want to compare everything that looks even vaguely online-communityish with MySpace these days. The sites are totally different, with different goals and different ideals, and there's absolutely room for both approaches on these crazy internets of ours.
rebellibrarian asked, "Recently I saw that you don't consider LJ to be a social networking site - have you considered adding more features to make it more social networking friendly since so many people are using it that way?"
And building on my last answer, while we aren't primarily a social networking site, there's absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that we do use social networking elements to enhance the journaling experience, whether those features are to enable people to find existing real-life friends or to make new ones. Just because social networking isn't our primary goal doesn't mean we reject it entirely! (Although, honestly, I've always been tempted to say that half of what "Web 2.0" calls 'social networking' is actually just good old-fashioned human nosiness, but that's just me.)
We've had things like communities and interest search for a really long time, and over time we've added more, like our Schools directory. Social networking isn't our primary goal, but we are very interested in where it overlaps with journaling, and we've got lots of ideas about how we can make it easier and more painless to talk to your existing friends, make new ones, and find people you already know who might be on LJ -- for instance, finally improving our search features, which one of my coworkers is going to address in his Q&A answers. But our interest lies in helping you find people who write the kind of thing you like to read, not facilitating random hookups. Much. :)
* boji asked, "With communities (especially those relating to fandoms) fragmenting into niches, is there any hope for a ticky-box that would enable posting the same post to multiple communities at one time?"
and
gattican asked, "Any chance of embedding music on our pages?"
I'm not the person who plans our development efforts, but I think I can safely say on both of these that we don't have any plans for either right now.
The reason we haven't added cross-posting is because -- well, it's really annoying to see the same post over and over and over again on your friends page. And sure, we could come up with some Usenet-style of cross-posting, where you only see an entry on your friends page once no matter how many communities it was cross-posted to, but that's development time that we could be putting somewhere else, and there's never been enough of a demand.
And as for music auto-playing when you load a page: as some wise man once said, "if I wanted your website to make noise, I'd lick my finger and rub it across the screen". Which is pretty much how we all feel about it. If you've got a paid account, you can create a custom style to add in background music, but I don't see us ever offering it as an 'official' option.
esoterikrootz asked, "When will LJ provide non-US phone post numbers for paid members & why the delay?"
Ugh, we know it's been forever since we said we wanted to add more voice post numbers, but we're really seriously limited by what our partner can provide, and they don't have international numbers. And as we mention every time this comes up, if there's anyone out there from a non-US telecom company who wants to work with us, give us a shout :)
You can use Gizmo Project to make a voice post, though. Just call the user "ljvoicepost". It's not ideal, but it is something. I think there are third-party forwarding services set up, but I don't know anything about them, what they cost, etc, etc.
* coffeecaptain asked, "Any chance we could see the financial statements?"
Well, sure, but then I'd have to kill you to prevent top-secret information from leaking.
Seriously, though: we're a privately-held company, so we don't have to share our financial statements with the public. Sure, we could, but that'd be like hanging up a sign for our competitors saying "free eats!" We'd love to be able to be more open with you guys -- in a general way, even without giving specifics -- but it would seriously hurt us to do so, because our competitors are always watching, and they go to a lot of trouble to figure out what they can about what we're up to. I like to think that we're one of the most transparent companies out there, still -- we work our little tushes off to tell you guys as much as we can about what we're doing and why we're doing it.
Shameless plug here: friend lj_biz, where I'm doing a series of posts about the reasoning behind a lot of our decisions! Many of the questions everyone asked will be covered in more depth in posts I've planned for the next few months. It's like you guys read my mind.
* igz00 asked, "How many users does LJ have? Any way of listing active users (posts within the last 6 months or something)?"
We actually do make some of our statistics public! (At least, as much as we can without giving too much away.) You can see the stats page, which updates every night.
* 7rin asked, "Do you keep track of all the "let's sue LiveJournal" suggestions?"
Any online provider gets threats of lawsuits all the time. Some of them are serious, and some of them are people who think that waving around their internet lawyer will get them whatever they want. We handle them all based on what the law, our Terms of Service, and our policies say, and we're very careful. I can't say much more without giving our lawyers hives. :)
* clare_dragonfly asked, "Are the options for gender selection ever going to broaden?"
Oh, this is a can of worms, and every time we talk about it, we wind up accidentally offending someone -- so please take this answer in the spirit it's offered, and I apologize if I accidentally give offense.
I've heard a bunch of very good reasons for expanding the selection of "gender" options on the drop-down selection. "Gender" and "sex" are two entirely different things, and I know that many transgendered and intersexed LJ users wish that there were a better way of representing their self-identity.
There are a few reasons why we haven't made this change. First, we don't actually display that field anywhere -- it's not visible on your profile or anywhere in your journal, only in aggregate form on the statistics page, and we only ask for it because a lot of people -- reporters, potential business partners, etc -- like to know the very rough breakdown of our userbase. (It's also useful for social researchers, etc.) Second, whenever we start talking about expanding the options, we quickly run into the problem of: which other options do we offer? No matter what we do, we'll accidentally leave out or offend someone. Third, we do offer an "unspecified" option, which we think is slightly better than just the usual female/male binary reduction, and there's plenty of room in your userinfo and interests -- which are visible -- to fully explain.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of ever broadening the selection -- it's always possible. But we've never really found a solution that will satisfy everyone, and so we sort of stick to the status quo until we can find a more satisfying solution -- because we think that our current options are, while certainly not perfect, better than making a change that will offend or confuse more people. We know that a percentage of our userbase doesn't fit into the binary gender construct, and we think that's just another awesome sign of the diversity on LJ. We don't want to force anyone into making an uncomfortable choice or self-identifying in a way that they don't feel fits them, which is why we'll always at the very least offer the "unspecified" option.
If we do make any changes -- and I'm certainly not promising anything! -- we'd probably offer a simple "other" option, rather than getting into all the many variations available. And it's certainly possible we'll do that in the future -- we've been talking about it in conjunction with some of our future improvements. But for right now, we think that offering "unspecified" and the option to clarify in interests or userinfo is a reasonable compromise for the time being.
* makesmewannadie asked, "Can I get a guesstimate of how much of your population is primarily here because they're involved in media fandom? I know you don't poll on things like that, but just, the view from the top, as it were."
Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to start guessing -- and I'm involved in LJ fandom myself! There's a huge problem with "how do you define fandom and who's involved in it". We have a lot of really fascinating, thriving subcultures on LJ, fandom included, and I'm a sociologist at heart -- I love poking into them, seeing how they work, how they've adapted LJ's tools to their needs, etc. We're actually starting some intensive internal research into those subcultures, to see what we can do to help improve their experiences! (Without negatively affecting the site for others, of course, which is always a careful balancing act.) So the answer is -- I don't really know percentages or numbers, but there are a lot of groups (like fandoms) drawn to LJ for the things we offer, and we love seeing what they do and how they do it.
* gilliannegarret asked, "Why so many changes after Six Apart said there would be no changes?"
Let's be accurate here -- Six Apart didn't promise no changes at all. That would have been silly, because a website or a community that doesn't change and grow will stagnate and die horribly. (We don't want that. I don't think you guys do either.) What Mena said when we first announced the acquisition was that Six Apart wouldn't make changes just for the sake of change -- the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" idea.
Problem is, a lot of people didn't realize just how badly some things on LJ were broken. We (as in the group of people who worked for Danga before the acquisition) always knew that there were rough edges and bad spots, but we never had the resources to fix them. There were other features we always wanted to add (our notifications system being a prime example) but we never had the resources to program them. We had plenty of technical/hardware infrastructure, but Six Apart gave us a lot of the business infrastructure we were lacking to make all of that easy -- they let us hire people who specialized in the 'business' stuff, so our engineers could get back to engineering, as well as hiring more engineers to share around the workload.
As a side note, and because this is as good a place as any to say it: I'm personally really bummed out by all the people who think Six Apart is the devil incarnate, or all the people who keep talking as though there's an "us" and a "them". Sure, there's "people who were here before Six Apart" and "people who came on after", but I can promise you there's no secret cabal of people in a shadowy back room steering LJ in the direction "they" want it to go. Out of all the places I've worked, Six Apart is the best for fostering team discussion and input on decisions and direction, and everyone -- whether they used to work for Danga or came on afterward -- loves LJ and all its little quirky habits.
The decisions we make -- and I'm deliberately not saying "Six Apart" there, because come on, guys, it's been twenty months, and 'they' is 'us' by now -- are motivated by wanting LJ to be a viable service one year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. Change is part of that, whether it be new features, fixing old features, or just improving the navigation and workflow of the site so people don't get so completely lost when they visit us. I know some of our decisions look weird from the outside, but there's a reason for all of them, and when we screw up, we fix it as fast as we can.
Personally, I've been here four years now, and I still think Six Apart is one of the best things to happen to LJ. It hasn't been a totally smooth ride, but nothing ever is, and we've been able to do some really cool things that we wouldn't have otherwise had the resources to do. And come on, let's not pretend that we of the old Danga days never got things spectacularly wrong, either. I can name quite a few examples. :)
somefan asked, "Has the rise of Myspace hurt LiveJournal at all?"
Only in that every time we announce a change, people in News comments invariably complain that we're turning into MySpace ;)
Seriously, though -- we're not MySpace. They're very good at what they do, but what they do and what we do aren't the same thing at all. MySpace is a social networking site, and LJ is a journaling site with some social networking features. Social networking isn't our primary goal, just like journaling isn't theirs. So really, it's like comparing apples and oranges -- people want to compare LJ and MySpace because people want to compare everything that looks even vaguely online-communityish with MySpace these days. The sites are totally different, with different goals and different ideals, and there's absolutely room for both approaches on these crazy internets of ours.
rebellibrarian asked, "Recently I saw that you don't consider LJ to be a social networking site - have you considered adding more features to make it more social networking friendly since so many people are using it that way?"
And building on my last answer, while we aren't primarily a social networking site, there's absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that we do use social networking elements to enhance the journaling experience, whether those features are to enable people to find existing real-life friends or to make new ones. Just because social networking isn't our primary goal doesn't mean we reject it entirely! (Although, honestly, I've always been tempted to say that half of what "Web 2.0" calls 'social networking' is actually just good old-fashioned human nosiness, but that's just me.)
We've had things like communities and interest search for a really long time, and over time we've added more, like our Schools directory. Social networking isn't our primary goal, but we are very interested in where it overlaps with journaling, and we've got lots of ideas about how we can make it easier and more painless to talk to your existing friends, make new ones, and find people you already know who might be on LJ -- for instance, finally improving our search features, which one of my coworkers is going to address in his Q&A answers. But our interest lies in helping you find people who write the kind of thing you like to read, not facilitating random hookups. Much. :)
* boji asked, "With communities (especially those relating to fandoms) fragmenting into niches, is there any hope for a ticky-box that would enable posting the same post to multiple communities at one time?"
and
gattican asked, "Any chance of embedding music on our pages?"
I'm not the person who plans our development efforts, but I think I can safely say on both of these that we don't have any plans for either right now.
The reason we haven't added cross-posting is because -- well, it's really annoying to see the same post over and over and over again on your friends page. And sure, we could come up with some Usenet-style of cross-posting, where you only see an entry on your friends page once no matter how many communities it was cross-posted to, but that's development time that we could be putting somewhere else, and there's never been enough of a demand.
And as for music auto-playing when you load a page: as some wise man once said, "if I wanted your website to make noise, I'd lick my finger and rub it across the screen". Which is pretty much how we all feel about it. If you've got a paid account, you can create a custom style to add in background music, but I don't see us ever offering it as an 'official' option.
esoterikrootz asked, "When will LJ provide non-US phone post numbers for paid members & why the delay?"
Ugh, we know it's been forever since we said we wanted to add more voice post numbers, but we're really seriously limited by what our partner can provide, and they don't have international numbers. And as we mention every time this comes up, if there's anyone out there from a non-US telecom company who wants to work with us, give us a shout :)
You can use Gizmo Project to make a voice post, though. Just call the user "ljvoicepost". It's not ideal, but it is something. I think there are third-party forwarding services set up, but I don't know anything about them, what they cost, etc, etc.