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[bryant]

The hot rumor is that Six Apart is about to buy Live Journal. That strikes me as a fairly bad idea for a number of reasons, mostly technological -- if you're not going to get economies of scale from merging code bases, then you're setting up Six Apart as a conglomerate, and frankly Six Apart just isn't big enough to support two completely divergent code bases and/or development teams. But if you do intend to merge the code bases, wow, that's a can of worms which (IMHO) would bring new feature development to a halt for six months to a year, minimum, on both sides of the fence.

Now would not be a good time to slow down new feature development, what with MSN getting into the blogging mix, Wordpress picking up steam, and so on.

There are also cultural/marketing issues, in that Live Journal is a community rather than a service or a product. That can be overcome with good PR and communications. Assuming Six Apart learned from the uproar surrounding their pricing announcements earlier this year, they'll be OK in that regard.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

Have you read the MeFi thread? http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/38359

Either some people know what's going on or they're blowing smoke.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

Agreed on the PR/communication issues. Tech wise, both are LAMP based. It's a better tech merge than it is a business merge. I'd worry more about MSN and google/blogger than wordpress.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

What makes this ominious for me is the easygoing nature of LJ's business arrangements and the quotes about the VC behind 6A expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar a year business. That sounds like the sort of people that will look at 2.5 million uers and say 'if we can get half of them to pay' and 'if we can put up ads', et al.

If they do it like Amazon dealt with imdb -- leaving the free content and methodology alone and added premium features -- I'll be fine with it, but I suspect the intersection of LJ and anyone with a business plan and profit goals is going to be ugly.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Ugly, and likely to cause me to flee. Which reminds me that I need to backup some stuff...

[bryant]

Whence the VC quotes? I don't think I've seen those.