LiveJournal Sold to SUP
News that is rocking some parts of the blogosphere and making bloggers nervous: Six Apart sold the popular platform LiveJournal to the Russian company SUP. This sale has a number of implications for bloggers. How much might the platform change? How will new owners treat the established community? What might happen to any number of policies LiveJournal users have heavily influenced?
Millions of bloggers in the United States use the software, as do millions of people in Russia. We’ve seen various online communities change as different cultures begin to dominate the userbase, like Orkut, Google’s social network.
One of the advantages of being a community of users who has worked closely with developers, like LJ and Six Apart have, is that the developers have a good sense of who their users are and how to serve them and users have ideas about what to expect from the company and perhaps whom to contact about certain matters. Several times, the community has spoken out about policy or other changes, which SixApart has then altered to please the community. The group has a lot of power. How will having new owners change the dynamic of that relationship?
Among the folks I know who blog, LJ is probably the most popular platform. One told me the news with a fair bit of concern. I e-mailed another to get her views on the sale. It’s critical enough to one corner of the blogosphere that it’s probably going to be the topic at Thursday’s blog group.
“[W]hen was the last time a company you had dealings with was improved by an acquisition?” asks one concerned LJ user in a post that highlights many worries. If it were easier to move intact content from one blog platform to another and migrate entire communities, perhaps this ownership change would not cause so much stress.
Addendum 12/20: We’re talking about the sale at blog group tonight. Someone from the Davis Square LJ community and a few LJers were present. One of the posts Erica flashed on the screen was someone discussing how a sale of LJ isn’t just a sale of software, but the sale of a culture, too.
