

Lessons from the failure of Livejournal: when not to listen to your users - randomwalker
http://arvindn.livejournal.com/96382.html

======
nostrademons
It's interesting to read this, since I was a member of the fandom contingent
of LJ from 2002 to about 2005. I guess that makes me a social deviant. ;-)

Anyway, there's a grain of truth to this. The fandom community is
disproportionately early adopters. After all, people with mainstream interests
can hang out with their friends in real life instead of meeting them online.
Many of my fandom friends were among the first users of GMail (I got my invite
from one of them), they were among the first to switch to FaceBook when it
opened up to non-college students, and now they're the ones that are on
Twitter and checking out FriendFeed.

However, I think there were many, many other problems with LiveJournal that
prevented it from gaining mainstream adoption:

1.) Until about 2005-2006, the front page never really explained what
LiveJournal does or why you should have one. If you didn't have friends that
were already on LiveJournal, you didn't know how to use it.

2.) It was plagued by perpetual scaling problems - in 02-04, it was virtually
impossible to get your friends page to display. It was as bad as Friendster,
and worse than nearly every other social networking site.

3.) Their decision to open-source their code meant that whenever they did
anything controversial, someone would set up a competing site and a large
fraction of their userbase would migrate, coming back when that site went out
of business. When they had their scaling woes and required invite codes to get
a new account, everyone went to DeadJournal. When they lowered the number of
free icons, everyone went to GreatestJournal for icon hosting. When they
pissed off the dev community by calling them ("Nobody but me could run this
site" -- Brad Fitzpatrick), Plogs.net got started. When they banned
fandom_wank, it just migrated to Journalfen.net. It's really not a brilliant
idea to charge money for your service and then give away your source code for
free.

4.) They were just too early. Same reason that YouTube, Comcast, and Verizon
Fios got rich providing the same service that Enron Broadband had wasted
billions on. Mainstream adopters were not ready to shift their social lives
online in 2002.

In particular, the article suggests that if they'd let you import external RSS
feeds into your LJ friends page, they could've become the default feedreader
for the web. There're good reasons to believe this isn't true, notably:

a.) This describes Bloglines, which came out in 2003 and wasn't notably more
successful.

b.) It does _not_ describe FaceBook or MySpace, which _were_ successful.
Really, the whole "feed" concept seems to be a bust among mainstream users -
PointCast failed in Web 1.0, RSS never caught on outside the technorati, and
FriendFeed is early-adopter only.

c.) They _did_ let you import external RSS feeds into your Friends page - it's
just that free users were limited to no more than 3 feeds (paid users still
had a limit, but it was higher), making it not so useful.

The article also mentions pingback support - my friend implemented trackback
support for LiveJournal in 2003, and it sat in the CVS repository for _2
years_ without ever being merged into the production codebase.

Really, if I had to pick a reason LJ went nowhere, it's simply that it was too
early. And it's not like it was a super-huge failure too: the founder still
got his f-u money.

------
wheels
Always listen to your users. Don't always do what they ask.

When I took a course on software usability many years ago the first principle
was how to work from what a user asked for to what they wanted to do. So, a
user might say, "Can I have a checkbox to turn off feature Y?" What that meant
was, "The way feature Y is implemented annoys me." And the solution is often
to rethink feature Y and what it's supposed to do.

~~~
jacobbijani
Exactly. Henry Ford heard "I want a faster horse" but gave people an
automobile. Because he heard "I want to go faster."

~~~
wheels
To be clear, Henry Ford was a great innovator in production and assembly
techniques, but Karl Benz created the first automobile 23 years before the
Model T. I suspect what Ford heard was, "I want an automobile." He figured out
how to do that cheaply and on a large scale.

~~~
DabAsteroid
_Karl Benz created the first automobile_

The first automobile was created before Karl Benz was born.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile>

Benz created the first _production_ automobile in 1888, 3 years after his
(and, respectively, Daimler's and Maybach's) first automobile, and 20 years
before the first production Model T was built at the Piquette Plant on
September 27, 1908.

~~~
jacobbijani
oh my god, you guys. way to miss the point.

~~~
byrneseyeview
No, stop. It is important to be able to object precisely and factually. It is
trivial to look up information, and leaving misinformation in a comment
because you can't be bothered to check the Wikipedia articel is as jarring as
that typo I didn't bother to correct a few words ago.

------
wehriam
LiveJournal isn't a failure! It has millions of users! It is responsible for
substantial open source projects! It pioneered social media! It made a few
people rich!

I don't drive a Model T, but a lot of people did.

Show some respect.

~~~
antiform
Hear, hear.

Memcached is damn useful, and Perlbal saved me from server meltdown and
banning many a time when it was still my favorite language to write the
hackish, duct-taped monstrosities I called "web applications."

LiveJournal hasn't been the same since bradfitz stopped working on it, but it
was a milestone as far as interactivity on the Internet is concerned.

------
gamble
This post misses the main reason LiveJournal is a niche site today: they were
invite-only for years. LJ had severe performance issues during the first
couple of years, and to keep the system usable during that period new accounts
could only be created if you procured an invite from an existing user. By the
time they fixed the problems and removed the invite system, LiveJournal had
been eclipsed by the growth of other social-networking sites.

~~~
randomwalker
They opened up to the public in 2003, which is when I signed on. They had
memcached by then. My analysis is about the last 5 years. Other social
networking sites did exist, but they didn't let you blog or read feeds. LJ had
something unique.

~~~
gamble
Unfortunately, MySpace started up about six months before LiveJournal removed
the invite system, and clobbered LJ by seeding themselves with 20 million
accounts on the first day. At that time the demographics for MySpace and LJ
were roughly the same, and most people simply followed their friends onto
MySpace. The coup de grace came a month after the invite system was removed,
when Facebook was launched.

I'm not saying that the invite system was the only mistake they made, but it
cost a year or two of lead time and allowed competitors with much deeper
pockets to make up the gap.

------
ojbyrne
Its interesting that there's no mention of SixApart. My theory would be that
SA bought them to kill them.

~~~
staunch
Does that really make any sense? Once they owned LJ any success it had was
theirs. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
stupidity."

~~~
ojbyrne
Companies are made up as individuals, and the actions of a large company are
often not just the actions of the top management. And I didn't mean to suggest
malice rather than stupidity, because it could have been entirely due to
"institutional" stupidity.

------
known
Didn't Livejournal create Memcached?

~~~
randomwalker
You're not the only one to mention memcached. Please go read the article,
that's part of what I'm complaining about. They had memcached, and so many
other things, including a very advanced commenting system, and yet they lost
the opportunity to scale and go mainstream, and remained a niche site which
consists largely of support groups and fanfiction. (Again, nothing wrong with
that, but it could have been so much more.)

