Well there have now been reports of significant layoffs of Livejournal staff that came with no notice, and apparently no severance either. Apparently the Russian company that purchased Livejournal last year has come to realize that the social networking bubble was already beginning to burst when they bought it – and with a wide reaching economic downturn it looks as if these layoffs are just the first round in what may be the death knell for Livejournal. Perhaps myself and others are being a little negative on the future of the long lasting blog service, but at the moment the signs aren’t favorable ones. Personally I wouldn’t be overly upset if Livejournal went belly-up. While I’m not cheering for them to do so as it is a fairly easy way to keep up-to-date with several friends, I also wouldn’t be upset over the loss. I’ve had a warm/cold relationship with Livejournal for awhile, so their demise would certainly mean I’d stop waffling over whether I was going to continue to post there, or just use my account to keep tabs on other friends journals while shifting all my focus over here to the Travesty.
My only real fear over Livejournal going away is that more of my friends, the ones who decide to keep being active on some service anyway, will shift over to something such as Facebook, which, while I check it on occasion, I am not at all fond of. It is a service set up to fritter away any privacy you may still hope to cling to. Along with its cluttered, horrid interface (no, I don’t want to play your stupid facebook games or take your facebook quizzes), the signal to noise ratio on it is incredibly unfavorable.
Fortunately, for those of my friends who make a shift over to a private journal, or other journaling service, I already make use of Newsfire, an excellent RSS aggregator. It’s available on the Mac and I’ve been using it for years to follow a bunch of websites I read. It feeds in to my addiction of merely skimming headlines. For those who aren’t on a Mac, or not inclined to pay for software, I understand that Google Reader is pretty easy to use.
All of this, of course, assumes that Livejournal is actually circling the drain. In the online world you just never know where things may end up. So for now I’ll keep making the occasional post in my Livejournal, and checking up on my friends there, not worrying about what to do next until the day I click on the link and find nothing there.
Just a Man with a Mash Paddle 