LiveJournal ( or ), formerly stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.
Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007; the service continued to operate out of the U.S. via a California-based subsidiary, LiveJournal, Inc., but began moving some operations to Russian offices in 2009. In December 2016, the service relocated its servers to Russia, and in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to conform to Russian law. As with other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the service, as do political pundits, who use it for political commentary, particularly in Russia, where it partners with the online newspaper Gazeta.ru.
Features The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternary (with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can "friend" the other without reciprocation.
The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term, but because it is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used this way.
A user's list of friends (friends list, often shortened to flist) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users. Generally, "friending" allows a user's friends to read protected entries and causes the friends' entries to appear on the user's "friends page". Friends can also be grouped together in "friends groups", allowing for more complex behavior.
Features common to all accounts Each journal entry has its own web page, which includes the comments left by other users. In addition, each user has a journal page, which shows all of their most recent journal entries, along with links to the comment pages. The most distinctive feature of LiveJournal is the "friends list", which gives the site a strong social aspect in addition to the blog services. The friends list provides various syndication and privacy services, described below. Each user has a friends page, which collects the most recent journal entries of the people on their friends list. LiveJournal allows users to customize their accounts. The S2 programming language allows journal templates to be modified by members. Users may upload graphical avatars, or "userpics", which appear next to the username in prominent areas as on an Internet forum. Paid account holders are given full access to S2 management and more userpics, as well as other features. Each user also has a "User Info" page, which contains a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources) and lists of friends, interests, communities and even schools the user has attended in the past or is currently attending. LiveJournal has five account levels: basic (comprising approximately 95% of the network); plus (sponsored with more advertising); "early adopters" who were registered prior to 14 September 2000; paid; and permanent. Permanent accounts are normally not available to the average user; there have been occasional sale days or special offers, but such sales are not guaranteed in the future. Before March 12, 2008, basic accounts were ad-free; in August 2008, LiveJournal resumed new basic account creation but changed that account level to display ads to non-logged-in readers.This change first appeared in the LiveJournal FAQ , then, after being omitted from an official LiveJournal news post discussing changes in the first 100 days of SUP ownership , was itself the subject of a later news post . A LiveJournal spokesman said that LJ management did not consider it necessary to inform users of this change . Basic users also see advertising, but not on other basic journals. As well as allowing embedded videos from other sites, LiveJournal can host videos and allows users who have enabled the updated site design to post links to the hosted videos.Brouwer, Bree (January 22, 2015). "LiveJournal Debuts Video Hosting, Comic Book Legend Stan Lee First To Upload" . Tubefilter.Video hosting is here! , news.livejournal.com, January 22, 2015.
Paid account features Sending Text Messages – users can receive text messages sent via LiveJournal without sharing their phone number. If the text messaging feature is set up, anyone (or any authorized user) can use LiveJournal to send text messages to their cellphone by following a link on the User Info page. "To-do list" feature – LiveJournal offers "to-do lists" for managing users goals and aims. Users can have 150 to-do list items. Each to-do list item must have a subject, priority, details and descriptions, status, percent done, due date and categories field. "Express Lane" – users with paid accounts have access to express lanes that make pages load faster. When logged into their Paid or Permanent Account during times of heavy site load, their requests for pages are sent to the web servers before other users' requests. "Voice Post" – members with paid accounts can call from any phone to a specific number, record the audio and upload it directly to their journal. "Extra storage space" – lets users store more Scrapbook photos and voice posts. Photos and voice posts that have been uploaded there are easy to include in the log entry.
Community User interaction As of 2014, LiveJournal in the United States had 10 million monthly uniques, 30 million monthly visitors, and 170 million pageviews. As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries and create a message board-style thread of comments – each comment can be replied to individually, starting a new thread. All users, including non-paying users, can set various options for comments: they can instruct the software to only accept comments from those on their friends list or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts). They can also screen various types of comments before they are displayed, or disable commenting entirely. Users can also have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address.
In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group journals, dubbed "communities" (frequently abbreviated as comms). Anyone who joins a community can make posts to it as they would on a regular journal; communities also have "maintainers", ordinary users who run the community and oversee membership and moderation.
LiveJournal community LiveJournal community is a collective blog in which different users can post messages. Users who are interested in a particular subject can find or create a community for this subject. All the users of the communities are divided into: Owners who are supervising the community and capable to use all administrative functions that are available for managing the community. Maintainers usually use their own user accounts to supervise a community, control its settings and Community Info, perform some administrative functions. Moderators can approve or reject messages left by participants, add existing records label or tags, approve requests to join a community, hide and freeze comments. Members can see the community's members-only entries. For Communities with fewer than 500 members, the entire Members list will be displayed on a Community Info page. Watchers can assign permissions, allow entry into the community, delete posts (messages) or hide comments on posts.
Contributors Some areas of LiveJournal rely heavily on user contributions and volunteer efforts. In particular, the LiveJournal Support area is run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Similarly, the website is translated into other languages by volunteers, although this effort is running down due to a perceived lack of involvement from the LiveJournal administration.
The development of the LiveJournal software has seen extensive volunteer involvement in the past. In February and March 2003, there was an effort, nicknamed the Bazaar, to boost volunteer performance by offering money in return for "wanted" enhancements or improvements. The Bazaar was intended to follow a regular monthly pay-out scheme, but it ended up paying out only once, after which it was neglected by the management, and shut down one year later.
Nowadays, voluntary contributions to the software are considered for inclusion less and less as the company has acquired more and more paid employees who focus on the organization's commercial interests. This has led to the formation of several forks, many of which introduce new features that users would like to see, especially features that are brought up repeatedly in LiveJournal's own suggestions journal.
Demographics
, 39,663,771 accounts exist on LiveJournal, with 1,790,795 listed as "active in some way." Of those users who provided their date of birth, the majority were in the 17–25 age group, with an exceptionally large group of 32-year-olds. Among the users specifying their gender in their profile, 45% of those accounts identified as male, and 55% as female. One fifth, or 20%, of accounts did not specify a gender.
LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries (although there is a language selection feature), and the United States has by far the most LiveJournal users among users who choose to list a location. There is also a sizable Russian contingent. LiveJournal is the largest online community on the Runet, with about 45% of all entries in the Russian blogosphere. Yandex researched Russian-language blogosphere – Yandex company news, September 26, 2006
Mascot: Frank the Goat Frank the Goat is LiveJournal's mascot. During the early years of the site, Frank was treated like an actual living being by much of the LiveJournal userbase, and his brief "biography" as well as his "journal" reflect this.
Sometimes, callers to LiveJournal's Voice Post service are informed "Frank the Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly.
A weekly comic about Frank, written and drawn by cartoonist Ryan Estrada, was updated every Thursday on the "Frank: The Comic Strip" community on LiveJournal. As of July 2009 the community had roughly 8,000 members, and was watched by more than 7,000 LiveJournal users.
Beginning at the end of January 2010, LiveJournal's weekly news posts included references to Frank's life, becoming works of short fiction at the end of February. These pieces are often tied to weekly virtual gift promotions, where commenters that meet a certain criterion will receive a free v-gift sent by Frank.
Content Privacy LiveJournal provides an option intended to reduce the chances of search engines indexing a journal; however, the only way to make it completely impossible for such indexing to occur is to set the entry security to "friends only" or higher when first posting the entry. If an entry is first posted publicly, and then edited to reflect a higher security level, it may have already been indexed by a search engine in the time between the security edit. The popular "friends only" security option, which has since been adopted by Xanga and Myspace, hides a post from the general public so that only those on the user's friends list can read it. Some users keep all their posts friends-only (except for a single post explaining that the journal is friends-only). Still, such features as tags and userpics cannot be hidden. LiveJournal also allows users to create custom user groups within their group of friends to further restrict who can read any particular post, and to allow reading of subsets of a user's friends list.