While reading the tech news this morning, it appears that the team running LiveJournal has made 20 of it’s 28 staff redundant. It looks like the beginning of the end for LiveJournal, which is a huge shame.
Even though I’ve only been an active member for the past few weeks, I have really enjoyed the LiveJournal experience over and above just about every other service I have used. The sense of community is much stronger than any other social network I have used (and believe me, I have used many of them).
The coming months are going to be both worrying and interesting from a contributing community member’s point of view - will LiveJournal survive, and if they don’t, where will the community migrate to?
The most obvious answer is perhaps Vox (http://www.vox.com) - owned by SixApart, who owned LiveJournal previously. In many ways Vox is a re-imagining of LiveJournal, and much more a child of the Web 2.0 generation. While it looks prettier, it’s also slower - purely because the interface is more “clever”, and therefore a little heavier in terms of HTML and graphics.
I guess the possibly impending doom of LiveJournal makes us all focus on those we would hate to lose touch with, and causes us to forge more permanent bonds with them - perhaps creating groups within our email clients, and making sure we have their contact information.
One excellent tool to assist in maintaining communication in these turbulent times is FriendFeed (http://www.friendfeed.com) - a feed aggregator that allows you to create a firehose of every feed you generate. My own “FriendFeed” - at http://friendfeed.com/jonbeckett73 aggregates together my blog posts, my LiveJournal posts, my Flickr photos, any Google Reader posts I share, Twitter posts, and so on. Within the site you can friend each other, and therefore created an aggregated feed of aggregated feeds. Just go check it out - it will make sense when you see it. Add me too