Before MySpace and Facebook, LiveJournal was the first convenient, fun network to keep in touch with your friends. We would document our lives in a journal and comment on each other’s entries daily. For many years LJ was the place to meet new people, express yourself creatively, even market a small businesses. And then something happened. LiveJournal became dead journal; posting in it was like screaming in a desert – no one will hear or care.

My sister wrote a piece about her personal experience on LiveJournal – why she started it, how it came to an end, and what the future holds. I just had to share.

Written by Kat V.

In an effort to show courtesy to my fellow LJ-ers, I went through my friends list and read their journals. I discovered that most had stopped posting regularly around 2006, which incidentally is about the same time I stopped caring for LJ too. The reason for this massive abandonment of a previously popular internet destination is Facebook. Like MySpace, LJ is suffering a slow and painful death. It is essentially a stabbed, bleeding half-corpse. “It’s like a superhero that’s been shot in the back and lunges forward, without realizing it,” one of the commenters evokes.

Some users, like me, still cling on for lack of motivation to start a new blog or maybe due to some nostalgic attachment to LJ. But in general, nobody cares for other people’s whining, especially when it’s laid out poorly and lacks pretty pictures. Nowadays, the preferred blogging platforms are Blogspot and Wordpress, which have a cleaner, prettier layout. LJ is actually celebrating its 10th anniversary in April of this year. This means they’ve been around since 1999 – that’s before the millennium! They’re actually putting together a book with some highlights from LJ’s existence. I suppose what makes LJ different from Blogspot and the rest is that there are many communities, which I never took part of (and the one I did join, City Life, filled my friends page with gigantic photos of cities throughout the world).

Content wise, good blogs nowadays are rarely about the self. They usually entail some personal experience but try to reach out to a bigger audience with topics other than the blogger’s personal life. So I am now questioning the quality of my blog – or, rather, a journal. It was never meant to be entertaining. It was started when I was 18, and thus documented a good portion of my life and a good chunk of teenage idiocy. Now I’m wondering whether I should write a real blog that would be interesting to other people, not just me.

I went ahead and enabled anonymous commenting on my LJ. Maybe that’s what was preventing thousands of readers of brilliant and entertaining kat in the hat from leaving their mark? I changed the status of many entries from “friends only” to “public” because I realize that virtually none of my friends have LJ accounts, making “friends only” as good as “private”. I tried to remove most identifying content though, especially the kind that could embarrass The Company.

P.S. A friend of mine recently mentioned the word “Web log” a couple of times. I was very surprised to hear it. Most people have already forgotten that obsolete term.

Deerlings: what is your favorite social networking site today? Why?

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