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January Status Post

Monday, Jan 31st, 2005 -- 4:48 pm

jproulx		 January is now over, and what a roller coaster ride it was! Early on in the month we made the huge announcement that Six Apart bought LiveJournal. The week after the announcement LiveJournal suffered a major power loss at its colocation facility (We're still fuming about it, but we're working to make sure we're better prepared if it happens again). The following week a bunch of us employees flew down to San Francisco to meet our new coworkers and to check out our new office. As you can see, January was unusually busy for us ;-p

So, after meeting the new company, dealing with power loss and maintenance issues, and fixing up small bugs throughout, this month didn't leave us a lot of time to work on new or improved features. We did add a new statistics report to all pages served through the Express Lane that shows you the time saved in loading pages. We also worked on comment spam issues: anonymous comments now have all URLs un-linkified, and we pledged support for adding "rel=nofollow" to unknown links with Google.

In ScrapBook news, we nailed down an annoying load balancing bug, which put an end to all of the "MD5 Mismatch" errors people were seeing. Mahlon wrote up a new style called Smoove which you can select for your account on the Your Styles page. As for additional disk space, we're conferring with our new parent company about the prices we originally decided on. Once we're done with that you'll be able to buy blocks of disk space directly from our store.

Sorry about the short status post, we've been so awash in meetings, bug fixes, and trying to move an entire office down south that we haven't been working on our regular schedules. Hopefully the coming months will even out once we're settled down.

I hope you all have a great February!

Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal!

Wednesday, Jan 5th, 2005 -- 9:03 pm

bradfitz		 Yes, the rumors are true!

I've been dying to post about this but I haven't been able to until now. We just had to finish up the legal stuff and make sure everything was signed before we could make it all official.

Six Apart bought LiveJournal!

We're all psyched about this, and I know you guys all have some questions, so I'll try to preemptively answer them. Based on the comments we get, we'll be posting more and more clarification posts until everybody understands what's up.

Who's Six Apart?
If you've never ventured outside of LiveJournal land, it's possible you haven't heard of Six Apart, but more than likely you have... They're the company responsible for Movable Type (their weblogging product) and TypePad (their service). They're also a small company, but a bit bigger than Danga (that's us), and with more direction.

What does this mean for LiveJournal?
Nothing earth-shattering. LiveJournal development and support will continue, and will probably even accelerate, as we grow the team. We'll continue to work on speed, reliability, and new features.

LiveJournal won't become paid-user-only or anything crazy like that. We're not going to raise prices. We're not going to cancel permanent accounts, etc, etc. And we're not going to spam or sell your information. You own your journals, not us. Really you shouldn't see any negative changes.

The most immediate changes will be that we'll start to get prettier... more styles, themes, etc. Six Apart is really good at that and we're not.

What happens to the Danga employees?
We're moving to San Francisco! *ding ding*

Why is Danga selling LiveJournal?
I love technology and designing the LiveJournal architecture but I hate running a business. While I've been learning a lot of business stuff over the past 5 years and it's been kinda interesting, I just don't love it and I'm not great at it. Plus it just keeps getting harder as LiveJournal grows, sucking away more of my time and youth. I'm ready to pass off what I see as "the boring stuff" to somebody else that I trust and focus on the fun stuff.

Also, Six Apart has a lot of staff that we don't... marketing, designers, usability people, etc. It's been frustrating the past few years knowing that in a number of ways LiveJournal is technically the best but because we weren't the prettiest and didn't give good quote, we were often overlooked. I want that to change ... we'll continue to focus on technology and they'll help us make our stuff pretty and usable. They want LiveJournal to stay LiveJournal and that's why I picked Six Apart.

Do you trust them?
I totally trust Six Apart.

Ever since LiveJournal got big and popular, a number of companies have been offering to buy LiveJournal. I suppose it was inevitable, but the more I talked to everybody, the less interested I became in selling. With a few exceptions, nobody seemed to "get it", and people's ideas for LiveJournal's future were generally lame. I started to realize that selling LiveJournal would mean killing LiveJournal, so I didn't. Then one day Six Apart contacts us, we start talking, and here we are. I know you may not necessarily trust me when I say they're a cool company, but I'd ask at least that you give them a chance before you start rioting in the streets. I have a lot of confidence that this union will produce cool things.

Ben and Mena, the founders of Six Apart, have built a great company and hand-picked a lot of great people. Over the past couple months I've come to know their executive team really well, and they're people I feel confident taking over control of my baby. They've already shown that they'll defer to me on issues of community, fearful of doing anything that'd upset people. As for the rest of the team, I've only started meeting them all, but my mouth hit the floor when I saw some of the latest stuff they have in the works.

If you want to run for the hills and backup your journal and move to another service, feel free, but hopefully you'll be back in 6 months when we've proven ourselves.

Why didn't you just grow LiveJournal more and/or hire your own management team?
Easier said than done. Finding a good management team is next to impossible... I couldn't find anybody I'd trust as much as Six Apart. Most people that approach you and say, "Hey, I'd like to manage your company" are really just in it for money. I wanted a group of people that understood what I'd built and appreciated it for what it was, not what it could be if it could only extract more money from its users.

So in the end I realized Six Apart was just what I was looking for. Plus having a bigger pool of co-workers is more fun and more productive.

Why is Six Apart buying LiveJournal?
Lots of reasons:
  • Our companies are more alike than different.
  • We both use Perl.
  • Together we form super robot that's stronger than the sum of its parts.
  • Super robots can fight super companies.
  • They respect us, we respect them.
  • We have a number of features they don't.
  • We have experience with making "inward-facing" community sites, whereas their sites/products tend to be "outward-facing". They want some of that inward-facing action.
  • Because we're awesome.
What would be more interesting is why they're NOT buying LiveJournal: they're not buying the site to spam you, screw you, destroy the community, or convert you en massé to their other paid services. They just want to double our efforts and have a part in all types of blogging.

Does this mean LiveJournal will finally get TrackBack support?
I just knew somebody would ask this!

Yes, LiveJournal will get TrackBack. Actually we'd been planning it anyway, and we've even done a partial implementation recently. This kinda bumps up its priority though. :-)

In all fairness, there have been a number of TrackBack patches written for the LiveJournal codebase in the past, but none that were usable or scalable enough to run on the main site. Our new version was designed from the beginning to scale.

Are prices changing?
Nope.

That'd be silly and anger people unnecessarily. We want you guys to keep using the site and remain happy.

Do I have to now use TypePad or Movable Type?
No. We're not migrating you or anything like that.

Why is the TOS and privacy policy changing?
Our old TOS and privacy policies apparently sucked, from a lawyer point-of-view. We never had lawyers create or really even review the old ones... they were just a hodge-podge of misc lawyer-sounding things people had collected over time. A lot of the things that were changed are actually now better for the users. We just needed to clean things up.

Our goal isn't to really change anything with the new documents... just make them legally correct.

We're putting up the new documents now so you have time to review them and compare them to the old ones. In a few days (to be determined) you'll be required to agree to the new Terms of Service before logging in or posting, etc. Sorry for the inconvenience ... it's a lawyer thing.

Why is social contract changing to guiding principles?
Lawyers didn't like "contract" in the name "social contract" because it does not have the structure of a contract. The principles are the same, though. Six Apart doesn't want to kill LiveJournal. Don't worry --- I thoroughly screened them to make sure they weren't evil.

Why do I have to agree to the new Terms of Service before I can post to my LiveJournal?
We just need to make sure everything is on the level. If you have questions about the changes, we'll answer them.

What happened to my account? It seems like it was suspended?
If LiveJournal has conflicting info about your age in your account (it appears different in two places) you need to authorize your account to prove you're over 13 or have your parents' permission to keep a LiveJournal. In the past we did not allow anyone under the age of 13 to have a LiveJournal. Now you can have one even if you are under 13 but because of Federal Law you must get your parents' permission.

Will my permanent account be honored?
Of course! Your permanent account is permanent.

What does this mean for the future business plans of LiveJournal?
We feel that there's a lot of synergy between our two companies and we both benefit from this relationship by bringing a lot of value-add to the table. By focusing on our core competencies we can continue to provide robust, turn-key, industry-leading solutions while also lowering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to our valued clients.

(P.S. The above is all gibberish. Any time I hear any of those words I completely fall asleep and attempt to eat off my own ears. Six Apart did not say any of those words to me.)

Does this mean I get free TypePad and MT?
Naah, no plans for that. They're seperate and isolated. Maybe down the road there will be some promo or something, but that's not what this deal was about.

Will LiveJournal become TypePad or TypePad become LiveJournal?
Nope. We have no plans of forceably merging the two sites and communities into one, either.... that just doesn't make sense.

Will LiveJournal stay open source?
The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source... And some new stuff that's infrastructure-related will probably also be released open source. We're all definitely pushing for it, and Six Apart "gets it" when it comes to open source. Of course there will be some closed parts... there are already some now. What I personally feel is important is making sure the infrastructure guts are available, so other people building new, creative websites will be able to focus on the fun stuff and not shelling out lots of money to commercial vendors for basic things like storage and load balancing.

What happens to LiveJournal support and the volunteers?
Volunteers can continue to help out on the site, and we'll continue our tradition of users helping users in open forums. The existing employee-only support categories (like payments) will remain employee-only and we might have to add more employees to abuse to help set standards for support, but the rest will be open. We understand that some percentage of the volunteers will be upset about this deal and quit volunteering, and that's regrettable, but we'll do our best to keep everybody happy.

What everybody should understand is that LiveJournal was never a non-profit volunteer organization. Danga has always been a for-profit company and that's what volunteers contributed to. We just weren't aggressively for-profit trying to squeeze every last penny out of people. You'll have to make up your own minds about Six Apart and how they behave, but from what I've seen so far, they're very similar in behavior to Danga.

So I read all this and don't get it --- what's changing?
Really, not much.

We help them, they help us.

I need more info!
Oh, it'll be flowing in for weeks. Ask away. We won't be able to read every comment, but we'll try.

Update #1: I'm not going anywhere! I'm gonna work for Six Apart now (in San Fran), still doing LiveJournal stuff and infrastructure stuff.... I'll be their "Chief Architect". Likewise with the rest of the Danga stuff. If you think my baby (LiveJournal) will be destroyed, you better think again... I'm there to make sure they keep doing the right thing, but I'm already pretty sure that's all they will do.

Update #2: Six Apart's announcements:
http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2005/01/current_mood_op.shtml
http://www.sixapart.com/press/livejournal_acquisition_faq.shtml
http://www.sixapart.com/press/weblogging_software_leader_six_apar.shtml

 
Current Mood: excited

State of the Goat 2005

Friday, Dec 31st, 2004 -- 2:11 pm

jproulx		 Another year is coming to a close, and it has been a good year for all of us here at LiveJournal. I hope 2005 will treat all of you just as well as 2004 treated us!

2004 In Review
2004 was a busy year for LiveJournal. Starting the year off, a few of us employees moved out to Oregon to come work in the LiveJournal office in Portland. Shortly thereafter our entire employee development team was located in the office. With a centralized design and development team we were able to make many improvements and tackle many projects.

Some highlights for 2004 include:
On top of all that, there's been a veritable slew of new features added to the site:
Growth and Servers
Last January we passed the milestone of the 2,000,000th account, now we host over 5,500,000 accounts. As you can imagine LiveJournal has grown up a lot this year! If this continues we can expect to see 7 or 8,000,000 accounts hosted by the time LiveJournal turns 6!

Obviously this growth quickly brings to light any weak spot in our architecture, but we've been able to tackle traffic problems and roughly anticipate future growth. Starting off the year we converted most of our user clusters to Master-Master pairs, and later on we added a few new user clusters and another global master database server. Later on we started migrating users from MyISAM to InnoDB database tables, and we purchased a few pairs of 64 bit database servers to lighten the load.

We had some vendor supply problems ordering 64 bit servers and the servers had some problems passing burn-in inspection, but now we have two pairs in production doing 65% of our database traffic without blinking an eye. All of the migration to 64 bit servers allows us to free up older hardware, making system administration easier.

During the year we also bought a couple of storage servers that could hold 16 250GB disks each, giving us 8 terabytes of disk space. We started using that to host pictures and static files, and freed up our NetApp to host other things.

For 2005 we're going to continue making optimizations and working towards high availability and reliability.

ScrapBook
Our major focus goal for 2004 (as evidenced by its many [info]news mentions!) was our new photo hosting service, which we've recently dubbed "ScrapBook". ScrapBook has matured quite a bit since our State of the Goat 2004, and has been made much more robust in the process. Because of ScrapBook development we can now offer Moblogging support, direct posting of galleries to LiveJournal accounts, copying of galleries and pictures between accounts, and many other features. We also wrote our own filesystem to store ScrapBook images on our storage servers, and now LiveJournal uses it to store all sorts of static files.

Employees
Last year we touched on employees who had recently joined the fold, but this year was a little more subdued. In January we hired [info]marksmith to come code in-house for random projects, and now he's a development powerhouse, blazing through tasks and to-do lists left and right. Our newest systems administrator Matthew ([info]mwilson) is kicking ass (that is, when he isn't damaging vital appendages!), and is providing welcome job relief for [info]lisa. [info]whitaker made it out for another short internship over the summer, but both he and [info]daveman692 left us to pursue their educations. They're working remotely for the time being, and they'll both be back next year. Last but not least we hired [info]bleything to help out our support and abuse department and to act as one of the liasons between our volunteers and office developers.

Plans for 2005
Looking ahead to the future, we plan to focus on a few key projects, while continuing to make improvements in all areas:
  • Opening up ScrapBook — we're going to continue developing features, but our immediate goals are to finish the necessary documentation and offer accounts the ability to upgrade disk space.
  • Journal usage statistics — our own web report statistics have become a lot easier to maintain, so we'll be investigating the best way to offer individual journal statistics.
  • Event Subscription Notifications — a much talked about project on LiveJournal, we now have better means to bring it to fruition.
  • Journal post categorization — we're in the planning stages of offering user-managed post categories, so that users can organize their journals better and readers can filter the content they want to see.
  • Improved taskflow and usability — we've made a lot of improvements in our usability design practices while developing ScrapBook that we'll be using on LiveJournal projects.
Have a Happy New Year!

November Status Post

Tuesday, Nov 30th, 2004 -- 2:58 pm

jproulx		 November is coming to a close, and stateside we're all stuffed to the brim with turkey and politics. Earlier in the month Brad and Lisa attended the LISA conference in Atlanta, so we gave our new systems administrator Matthew ([info]mwilson) a crash course in keeping the site running smooth. Matthew's worked with us before at Silicon Mechanics, helping us by building custom servers to order, so we were eager to welcome him to the team.

November was a major bug fix month for developers. We prioritized bug fixes over new features, so [info]featureannounce has been pretty quiet. We're getting ready for some heavy holiday traffic, and we're preparing for loads of users uploading and sharing pictures.

In hardware news we're testing out a pair of new Itaniums, which are more 64 bit servers from Intel. Our existing 64 bit servers are running well, and are handling most of the database traffic on the site. In addition to new servers we're continuing to rearrange users to optimize slow databases, and we're moving completely away from lower performance MyISAM tables to faster InnoDB tables. We also ordered and received a set of new Big IP load balancers, which are slowly being tested and put into production.

FotoBilder development continued, and we renamed our photo hosting service to "ScrapBook" since "LiveJournal Photo Hosting Service" was a mouthful. We're a few days away from allowing people to buy more disk space (we still need a Terms of Service agreement and some more testing), and we're still planning and developing new features for ScrapBook.

And finally, as the holidays roll around we're offering a bonus for items purchased in our Store: For every $50 spent on service items, like Paid Accounts or Extra Userpics, we'll send you a $15 coupon good for clothing purchases. The amount spent in the store is cumulative, so if you bought $20 one day and $30 the next, you'll still get a $15 coupon. If you've bought something in the past few days, don't worry -- the bonus deal is retroactive from November 26th (Past midnight on the 25th, 12:01AM GMT) and will extend to the end of December. All bonus coupons will be sent by e-mail, and will expire at midnight (GMT) of December 31st.

Have a great December, and Happy Holidays!

GO VOTE! (today!)

Monday, Nov 1st, 2004 -- 3:32 pm

bradfitz		 US FlagI feel bad kicking Jesse's October Status Post off the front page, but there's something more important that we had to mention....

GO VOTE TOMORROW TODAY!

Please.

If you're an eligible voter in the United States, it's very important that you vote tomorrow today. The election in 2000 came down to a couple hundred votes, and this year's election is predicted to be even closer. Anybody who thinks that their vote doesn't make a difference should go read up on how close this election is. It's going to come down to handfuls of voters.

It's said that young people don't vote, and that's really sad. Go grab some coffee, wait in line, SMS your friends, read a book, play Gameboy.... then vote. It'll take a couple minutes and you won't feel like a mere observer to our democratic process.

Seriously, if you can vote tomorrow and you don't, I don't want to see any complaining on LiveJournal about this country over the next 4 years.... :-)

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