I still have a paper to write and a project to finish. However, I need a break.
Live Journal is in decay. Dreamwidth, a pretender to its throne, is born putrid. I have a few friends on who are syndicated on both, and I'm not sure which interface into their world to use, as neither are really desirable. Interstitial, audible advertisements are really inappropriate for web browsing. While a post can be syndicated on both, their comments won't be synchronised. It's a mess.
And it's all my fault. I've been a staunch Blogger supporter since right before Pyra Labs was bought by Google. Live Journal has always had one of the worst structured user interfaces I've had the privilege to suffer. I can only compare it to Government and University websites in how awful it is. Unfortunately, Live Journal does do one thing right: privacy and friend management. Google and Blogger is awful at this. So are almost all other services. Yes, I want to be able to micromanage who can see what on an individual post basis. Not being able to results in having multiple blogs, even with the broken Sign-in Required system Blogger has. What good is it to restrict access to a Blog all the time to the same set of people if you can't even notify them of updates automatically?
Blogger has gotten steadily better over the years. I have a hope that with Google's slow, incremental improvements to its social network, that it will get it right eventually. It actually has inside Google Buzz, but I don't really want to blog where I buzz. I don't know. Maybe I do? It doesn't help that Google's misintroduction of it earlier this year means that almost none of my friends use Buzz now. Sigh. I just hope they don't cancel it like they did with Wave. That cancellation remains ridiculous to me: hey, no one is using our unfinished and unrefined product, boo! Well, if they'd bothered to make it useable, I could have started! Sigh.
So, here is to the growing pains between Live Journal and wherever my friends move to replace it. If they need per-reader management, I'll suggest Google Buzz. I'm sure they'll linger with Live Journal for a little while, held hostage by their friend connections and communities and history of posts. Hopefully with the rising popularity of OpenID and (shudder) Facebook Connect and Google Connect, they'll be able to bring most of their audience with them. The best times always seem to be before, after, and now.
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