livejournal

Despite intense popularity of the BitTorrent system, Gnutella clients aren't dead yet. LimeWire 5 for Windows, Mac, and Linux keeps its hand in the file-sharing pot by borrowing your Google contacts to create a friend network and a snazzy redesign that surfaces the most important information first.

If you're not a fan of the Gnutella file-sharing protocols, I doubt this will be enough to grab your eye. Torrents run faster, depending on the number of seeders, and torrent content is rarely faked in the way that plagues the Gnutella networks. If LimeWire lights you up, though, there's … Read more

Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with … Read more

Social-media pioneer LiveJournal is the latest company to announce a round of layoffs, trimming down its employee head count in its San Francisco and Moscow offices.

A statement from the company came after a rumor on gossip blog Gawker suggested that a shocking number of LiveJournal employees--20 out of 28--had been cut. LiveJournal clarified that it was "about a dozen" cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

"LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration, and the customer service teams will remain in the United States," the release explained. "LiveJournal's … Read more

Longstanding social network LiveJournal published a report Friday that asked its users what makes the site unique. Written by a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Culture, and Communication department at New York University, the report contends that a defining characteristic of LiveJournal users is their "passion" for connecting with others. "LiveJournal's feature set encourages real, engaged, committed, long-term interaction with the site and friends met through the site, creating passionate users who care deeply about LiveJournal," the report said. Unfortunately, many of those "passionate" users seem to be moving to Facebook at a rapid rate.… Read more

I'm a social-networking addict. I'm never away from my Twitter stream, I always check Facebook for friend updates, and Friendfeed is probably my favorite Web tool this year. I check out Hi5 to catch a glimpse into the future, head back to Friendster from time to time, and can't help but check in with LiveJournal every few months when I feel nostalgic.

But for all that work with social networks, I've also become a somewhat critical and cynical user. And anyone who suffers from my same addiction probably has as well. That's why I've … Read more

There are several media-pushing services represented at the opening of the iTunes App Store, each with their own combination of supported sites. ShoZu (covered here) remains the whopper of them all with support for roughly 30 popular social sites and services. There are the major players, of course--Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, Blogger, Picasa, LiveJournal--but ShoZu isn't too high and mighty to upload text and images to some of the more niche guys, like Box.Net qipit, Snapfish, and SmugMug.

With so many services ready to cram into an app interface, things could get tangled up fast. But they don'… Read more

LiveJournal, the blogging platform that was a few years ahead of its time, announced Thursday that it has appointed Matthew Berardo, most recently the senior director of international business and product management at Yahoo, as its vice president and general manager.

Berardo had been at Yahoo for years, seven of which were spent in its London office at Yahoo Europe. A new senior management team has been brought on board along with him, which includes former employees of Expedia, virtual worlds developer Millions Of Us, and telephony start-up Jangl. Berardo will report directly to SUP CEO Andrew Paulson.

Founded in … Read more

LiveJournal is a popular blogging service that lets users set up a simple, no-frills blog with very little technical know-how required. Users can skin it any way they'd like, and make it a part of the LiveJournal blog network.

LiveJournal is also a very tight-knit social network. Users can befriend one another and keep up to date when other users post to their blogs. While the idea has made its way to other mainstream social networks like MySpace and Facebook, LiveJournal retains its appeal mostly because of its intensely engaged audience.

The company was sold to Russian media company … Read more

LiveJournal, the popular blogging platform/social network from Six Apart, has been acquired by Russian media company SUP. While financial details about the acquisition have not been disclosed, in today's press announcement Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart said the move "...is a great milestone for LiveJournal and also lets us to focus on the core products invented at Six Apart: Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox."

LiveJournal is the first English site in SUP's portfolio, which has a sports news service and two different Internet marketing agencies for audiences in Russia. The two companies … Read more