Owen Thomas writes that 20 of the organization’s 28 employees are gone.  "The company’s product managers and engineers were laid off," he explains, "leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers – which speaks to a website to be left on life support."

But here’s a bit of good news for everyone who’s not a member and hasn’t been affected by the layoffs: any underlying problems may be specific to LiveJournal.  After all, as Thomas notes, a Harry Potter/pedophilia dispute involving LiveJournal made headlines, and that would make it rather less appealing to advertisers than the average site.

 

Also, there’s the matter of LiveJournal’s sale to Russian media corporation SUP, which took place about a year ago.  It’s hard enough for any site to change hands; for it to sort of change countries, as well, has to make survival even more difficult.

We’ll hope that this constitutes a sort of random development, then, rather than a return to the layoff frenzy.

UPDATE: A LiveJournal representative was kind enough to write and say, "LJ laid off about a dozen employees, which is less than 20% of the entire LJ workforce."

An official statement then adds, "LiveJournal Inc. today announced a restructuring of their US and Russian operations to more effectively manage costs in light of the global economic downturn.
 
LiveJournal Inc.’s headquarters , technical operations (and servers,) legal, administration and the customer service teams will remain in the United States.    LiveJournal’s global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the US and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal."

Although LinkedIn has the perquisite Silicon Valley pedigree, its biggest appeal resides in Bollywood rather than Hollywood. MySpace finds the most fans in the US, while Turkey and Canada see more to like about Facebook.

The geeks at Royal Pingdom decided to get busy with Google Insights for Search, a new service from Google that drills into the search interest surrounding a topic.

They found that Friendster, seemingly all but forgotten in the US, enjoys interest in the Philippines. LinkedIn’s following in India likely reflects the site’s initial entry into the social networking space, along with the outsourcing of numerous tech jobs employing people with a keen interest in keeping connected.

LiveJournal’s popularity reflects its ownership. The home of thousands of online journals resides within the holdings of a big Russian conglomerate, far from its days as a Silicon Valley startup. Pingdom saw most searches for LiveJournal coming from Russia.

Looking at Google provides just one perspective, but given the predilection people have for plugging their interests into a search box, it may be showing some accurate insight into what people want as far as social networking brands go.

He’ll get something of a list of titles and duties while there.  "Vice president of product development" will correspond directly to LiveJournal.  A release states that he’ll also work as the director of product development for SUP, which owns LiveJournal, and serve on SUP’s executive committee.

These sorts of thing should, to abandon (and/or mix) the fish metaphor, be right up Shellen’s alley; he used to manage business and product strategy for the creators of Blogger.  Then, following Google’s acquisition of Pyra Labs, he became the founding product manager of Google Reader.

LiveJournal has had an unusual number of ups and downs in the past year, with account suspensions and the sale to Russian SUP being two of the more important events.  It’ll be interesting to see if the addition of Shellen helps smooth out the operations in any way.
 

The terms of the transaction haven’t been disclosed, so it’s hard to say exactly what took place.  Both sides have been more than willing to discuss what a wonderful development this is, though.

Worried about a lack of experience?  SUP has been working on the Russian version of LiveJournal for over a year, and every member of Six Apart’s LiveJournal team should stay with the product as it transfers hands.  Also, even though LiveJournal’s founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, has begun to work at Google, he will serve on a freshly-formed LiveJournal Advisory Board along with elected members of the LiveJournal community.

What about Russian censorship?  “SUP . . . reassured the community that while subscribing to a minimalist approach in managing the site, it will establish clear and concrete policies with regard to communication and consultation on issues vital to the community,” according to a formal statement.  Also, we should return to the fact that SUP has already been running some operations for about 13 months.

Meanwhile, Six Apart may be able to pay more attention to Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox, and has promised that “substantial growth” will take place in 2008.

If true, this would be a major win for Google – judging from Fitzpatrick’s Wikipedia page, he’s a pretty clever and productive guy.  And Fitzpatrick’s own post on brad’s life explains that he is indeed departing from Six Apart, and continues, “Yes, I’m bored, but that boredom isn’t SixApart’s fault.  I’ve been doing this whole LiveJournal thing for about 9 years now. . . .  I just need a change.”

It’s where he’s going that remains unknown, at least on official terms.  Valleywag’s Owen Thomas has it on good authority that the LiveJournal founder will wind up at the Googleplex, but those words have yet to come from Fitzpatrick’s fingers or Google’s corporate mouth.

On the other hand, it seems that Fitzpatrick may have intentionally ignored the subject.  Around 240 comments follow Fitzpatrick’s announcement, and there’s quite a lot of speculation (and well-wishing) among them if you’ve got some extra time on your hands.

Don’t worry too much about the heavy reading, though – if Fitzpatrick joins Google, we’ll surely hear all about it.  This is one guy who’s not likely to be turned down due to Mountain View’s hiring cutbacks.

Plaxo Launches Social Network Pulse

Using "people feeds" users can subscribe to the people in your address book and receive the content they want to share with you from a number of sites. The list of sites that are compatible with Pulse include, Amazon, AOL Pictures, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Jaiku, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Picasa, Pownce, Smugmug, Tumblr, Twitter, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Yahoo 360, Yelp and YouTube.

The company says they have plans to add more sites that are compatible with Pulse.

"Pulse represents the natural evolution of Plaxo," said Todd Masonis, Founder and VP of Products. "It’s all about keeping you more richly connected to the people you actually know, by transforming your address book into a true social network for your real personal and professional relationships."

Pulse users can share information publicly or only with people within their network. Other features of Pulse include one-to-one connections designed for categorization of relationships into family, friends and business network. It also has a share bar for sending messages, links or videos to those in your network.

Apparently, the company’s noble efforts included the removal of many fantasy communities where users share sexually-explicit fictional stories.

The mass reinstatement means that the deleted science fiction and fantasy “fandom” groups–many of which boast sexually explicit fiction written by fans about characters such as those from the Harry Potter or Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes–began reappearing Thursday.

The community retaliated and LiveJournal apologized and is in the process of reinstating the accounts that don’t violate its policy. It’s a tough decision for LiveJournal. The sites are not breaking any laws, but do violate LiveJournal’s terms of service which ban “objectionable” content.

I think we’re going to see more of this in the coming months. With state attorneys general ramping up their efforts to protect minors from internet predators, I think we’ll see a lot more social network users complaining that they’ve been the victim of overreaction or mislabeling.

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Others involved a famous boy wizard.  “One now-deleted group called ‘pornish_pixies’ focused on fan-written fiction, frequently sexually explicit, about characters in the Harry Potter novels,” writes CNET’s Declan McCullagh.

So it seems that LiveJournal went a little overboard; even the folks at Perverted Justice state, “[T]hey decided to just wipe out whole fields of communities whether they were related to those who advocate child rape or not.”

Also, as it was originally thought that LiveJournal had deleted the accounts in question (it now appears that they were just suspended), a number of users – hundreds of them – deleted their own accounts in protest.  Others voiced their objections within LiveJournal.

And now the chairman and CEO of Six Apart (which owns LiveJournal) has made a post on the site.  Barak Berkowitz lists his mood as “mortified,” and his post’s title, “Well we really screwed this one up…” gives you an idea of the admissions he makes.

“We have always been strong supporters of free speech and at the same time we believe deeply that children deserve special protections as well as the victims of violence and hate,” Berkowitz states.  “We tried to implement a policy that walk that line and we did it poorly, we are all sorry.  One could say that no matter what we did we would either be accused of opposing free speech or endangering children but I am sure we should and could have done this much better.  I hope you can forgive us and we can regain your trust.”

It will be interesting to how LiveJournal users react to this apology in the long-term – there was a lot of anger over the whole fiasco.  But come on, people – there’s a bit of humor in this, too.

“You are here because you have a problem with the way livejournal.com is being run graphically; obstructive interfaces popping up (ie: customize area); lack of customer-service displayed by the team in relation to ‘rebuilding’ the site (ie: one of the many truths); or clearly insane string of ‘fiddle-faddle’ from the Support Team, who is giving positive feedback where negativity is required.”

That’s the opening paragraph for a petition against LiveJournal interface changes, posted June 16th, 2006 and linked to by nearly 800 unique authors.

According to research from Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the LiveJournal post handily edged out a trio of entries from Crooks And Liars. The August 2006 ‘State of the Blogosphere’ post by Technorati founder Dave Sifry rounded out that top five.

Crooks And Liars occupied 22 places on the Buzzmetrics list of top 100 blog posts for 2006, the most of any blog. Malkin had 18 spots, while sites like Engadget, Think Progress, and Boing Boing also held multiple places in the roster.

Google’s Official Blog had eleven posts make the group. Their most linked post was one about the company’s acquisition of Writely, the online word processor.

Google also served as the topic of discussion for the fifteenth most-linked post. That one came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which expressed concerns about Google Desktop and recommended consumers not use the product.

A few well-known sites with significant traffic did not have a lot of places referring to their posts, though, as Nielsen noted:

We have to close with the 25th most-linked post, to the intrepid Amanda Congdon, whose arrival at the House of Mouse as an ABC News featurette began with her July departure from Rocketboom.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The nurse-in BreastfeedingIsNormal.org, a lactivist (their term, not mine) organization promoting healthy alternatives to the formula use. Though the organization reports thousands of letters being sent to LiveJournal to change their policy, Valleywag reports they were only able to get three breast-baring mothers to show for the nurse-in.

The saga begins mommy-bloggers posted images of breastfeeding on their blogs. LiveJournal suspended users displaying the 100×100 pixel icons that were deemed “inappropriate.” The debate escalated to a discussion of areola color, whether real or bottle nipples were okay to show on television, and what exactly can be considered “sexually explicit.”

After asking for clarification of the site’s policy regarding what constituted sexual explicit material, LiveJournal changed the wording to include “nudity.”

From BreastFeedingIsNormal.org’s press release:

ProMom.org has a picture gallery of banned breastfeeding icons on the site. Some of the images come with captions like “suck this,” “LiveJournal: Where Areola Size Matters,” and “Feeding our babies with our breasts since time began.”

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