• Free Account -- no ads, no cost, but minimal features.
• Paid Account -- no ads, costs money, get everything.

• Basic Account -- no ads, no cost, but minimal features. (the old "Free Account")
• Plus Account -- ads, no cost, medium feature set.
• Paid Account -- no ads, costs money, get everything.

...

"Basic Account is an option available to accounts which were created before March 12, 2008. No account created after this date can be turned into a Basic Account."

...

There's a bit of accuracy in this ValleyWag story, in that I'm leaving SixApart. But the reasons ValleyWag cites for me leaving aren't so accurate.

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. Even though I haven't been working on LiveJournal itself for perhaps a year or more now, people still think I am, and it's probably time to distance myself from it and move on... I just need a change. LiveJournal's in good hands -- I'm not worried about it. I haven't touched the code or the servers in ages, so I know it's fine.

I've really enjoyed working with everybody at SixApart, especially on public projects like MogileFS, Perlbal, OpenID, djabberd, Gearman, TheSchwartz, etc. But all that stuff basically just works now^[1], solving the problems they were meant to solve, and I find myself out of new things to work on.

Since I've always been just kinda been a floater engineer at SixApart, never really part of (or head of) a group, I just feel a bit detached now without something obviously broken consuming all of my time & attention. There are plenty of other groups at SixApart having fun working on other problems, so I could join one of those groups, but I think this is just a good point in my life to change directions a bit.

My apologies that there's not more drama to this whole story. :)

[1] Yes, things can always be better. But relatively good, compared to the past.

[	Tags	|	livejournal, work	]
[	Current Mood	|	sad	]

czircon

LiveJournal is really going to shit lately. The "sponsored communities" are bad enough; now we have to put up with ads on the front page as well? And not just banner ads, but ads with Flash and fake forms to fill out because they think it's more likely to trick you into clicking on it? Ugh. Unfortunately I'm pretty much stuck here.

• The Russian Internet boom is overdue. There's a lot of money to be made.
• Andrew Paulson is a businessman. He likes to make money. He recognizes the above.
• Andrew Paulson sees LiveJournal is really popular in Russia, and LJ could be used to bootstrap a bunch of other Internet services (do you smell "portal"?). Imagine: LJ accounts are also XXXX accounts. Or LJ usage is a "service of SUP", so when SUP does something different, you now know/trust SUP ... "oh yeah, SUP, the LiveJournal people, they're cool! I'll try out this other SUP thing...." etc. But needs money to do it. Talks to Mamut...
• Mamut, more than anything, likes to make money. He owns a bunch of stuff. Him investing in SUP is probably chump change. Why not do it? Sure, he's politically connected, so you can make the argument that investing in blogs is just a way to shut them down, but then how does he make money? Lay on the conspiracy theories, but I don't care... it doesn't make any sense. I believe Mamut at the end of the day wants to make money, not shut down blogging as a favor to the Kremlin. Because shutting down blogging is futile and he'd realize that.
• SixApart recognizes how popular LJ is in Russia, but we can't make any money from it, nor can we make it much better. The service is still so slow, hosted entirely in the US. (latency of 260 ms * 20-30 requests in series.... not fast!). Even if we hosted the public images and css/js in Russia and kept the private data/databases in the US and served the private data from the US, the performance would go up a ton. It'd be one 260 ms request and 19-29 30 ms requests.... do the math. We could then compete better with Russian-hosted services which would feel faster to Russians. Also, we can't do SMS or voiceposting in Russia. And we've never successfully dealt with a credit card processor in Russia. Or Yandex Money, which only has docs in Russian. Or Russian advertising for Plus users. Working with a Russian company for this makes total sense for us. They promote LJ in Russia and sign up users for us, deal with payments, SMS/voicepost/etc ... everybody wins. We get happier users that can actually pay if they want, and they get promotion for SUP, which later will be something bigger than just LJ.
• ...