Revisiting LiveJournal
I revisited a old internet haunt this weekend, and signed up for an account.I had an account a LiveJournal “back in the day” – when blogging was in it's infancy, and there were few if any collected places you could meet with other bloggers. In many ways Wordpress and Tumblrowe everything to LiveJournal.
In the days when the only option was to self-host a blog – even Blogger started out as a service to help self-hosting – LiveJournal was the first sizeable place you could register an account, choose a template, and start posting immediately. Anybody with eagle eyes would have spotted Mark Zuckerberg using LiveJournal in the movie “The Social Network” – he wasn't the first person to have a LiveJournal account, and certainly won't be the last – George R R Martin (author of Game of Thrones) somewhat famouslyposts to a LiveJournal account.
While thinking about LiveJournal this weekend, I couldn't help remembering the Jade Key quatrain from Ready Player One;
The captain conceals the Jade Key
in a dwelling long neglected
But you can only blow the whistle
once the trophies are all collected
In terms of the internet, LiveJournal reminds me of the house the quatrain refers to – and no, I'm not going to spoil the book for you by saying anything else.
LiveJournal is kind of an old house, still standing, out on the periphery of the internet – reminding us where we all came from. It's not as slick, or polished as the platforms that stood on it's shoulders, but it reminds us that new doesn't always mean better.
If you compare the likes of Tumblr or Wordpress, yes, they benefit from more modern user interface design, but when it comes down to it you find them wanting in almost every department when compared against the functionality LiveJournal had ten years before.
One of the main tricks LiveJournal always had up it's sleeve – and still does – is being able to make a single post “friends only” – where only the users within a group of your own design would be able to see the post. No other popular blogging platform has anything similar (other than the prototype I built a couple of years ago).
Anyway... I'm rambling. I will still be posting the long, navel gazing, introspective stuff here that I always have. I may however begin throwing all manner of the more cutting, controversial thoughts over to LiveJournal, because at least I can build a pretty damn good wall around it.