Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Back in December of the last year, when the Russian company SUP bought LiveJournal, I wrote this post, in which, among other things, I said that it wasn’t a very good thing for LiveJournal.  A few things happened since then, which confirmed my worries.  But the biggest of them is unfolding right now.

SUP removed basic (free) accounts from the registration form.  They have also introduced plenty of annoying advertising to existing free accounts.  Lots and lots of people got really annoyed with that.  In fact, there even was a boycott with some users not updating their diaries for 24 hours, while others going as far as deleting their diaries (no worries yet, since there is a way to restore the diary).

If you missed this whole story, here is a CNews article in English and here is a Lenta.ru article in Russian which cover the basic story.  For more, check numerous posts on the blogosphere.

Most of the people I know, saw it coming.  And this is surely not the last incident in this story.

I came across a really amazing LiveJournal community - photo_polygon (via thesz). Basically, it’s a stream of excellent journalism photography. Pictures of the world as it is. Strongly recommended.

If you are browsing LiveJournal being logged in to your account, be warned - there is a way for LiveJournal users to see who read their posts.  This functionality is currently available only to Russian users (yes, related to recent SUP acquisition of LiveJournal) and is provided via LJ.ru service.

There seems to be no way to opt out of being seen by post authors, other than using a separate account or browsing LiveJournal anonymously.  Both of these ways have their limitations though (access, comments, friends, etc).

Russian (or, Russian born) company SUP acquires LiveJournal blog service from Six Apart.  The two companies have been working together for the last six month or so, with SUP “taking care” of the Russian users of LiveJournal, which are an impressive 28% chunk of population.

How do I feel about this?  Here are some points from the top of my head, that will give you an idea:

• I have an account with LiveJournal, but I don’t use it that much myself.  There are a few blogs there that I read, but this is not by any means a vital service for my web life.
• I think that LiveJournal is lagging behind its competitors for some time now.  It needed a “push”.
• I don’t think that SUP will be able to “push” it.  For a number of reasons.  (Russia lags in technological development and understanding.   SUP is company established by “an international management team”, not techies.  And so on.)
• I don’t think that SUP (or any other Russian company for that matter) has enough trust to run a blogging service.  I think that many bloggers (especially political ones) will look for alternative services.
• I have a feeling that monetization of LiveJournal will get a bit more aggressive in the nearest future.
• I think that it’s time for a lot of people to take a look around and learn about other excellent blogging communities, such as WordPress.com for example.

It has been some time since I was thinking that logging into all those blogs to leave a comment is lame. I guess this idea visits heads of many people out there. During the last couple of days I added few more blogs on my blogroll and started to think more about this problem.

My thinking was in the direction of some WordPress service. At least in the beginning. Something along the lines of Blogs Of The Day. Some services, say Blog Passport or something like that, that could be used by all those WordPress intallations to authenticate visitors. Basically, the even the same database table from WordPress could be used as a base. A person would login to at Blog Passport and than visit any WordPress installation and at any site that would support the scheme he would appear as logged in user.

But all I did was thinking. I didn’t even investigate if there are any existing solutions. The good thing is that I didn’t write any code. Because today I stumbled upon something that would be acceptable - OpenID. I first saw it at LiveJournal.com. It already supports it.

The idea of an OpenID is simple. It is even simplier that what I was thinking. It is a distributed system that authenticates against a URL. You can be logged in at any website that supports OpenID and than any other site that supports OpenID would work for you . The description of the process, the protocol, and the development status are all at the project’s website.

The good things about OpenID so far are:

• free and open and intends to stay this way.
• decentralized
• supported by some big sites (LiveJournal.com)

WordPress plugin is in the works. I hope that this project will get some attention and that we will finally have one annoying problem solved. Cheers!