LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community. LiveJournal’s blogging features include those found in similar blogging sites (multiple authors, commenting, calendars, and polls). However, LiveJournal differentiates itself from other blogging sites by its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to other social networking sites.

LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.

On December 2, 2007, Six Apart announced it was selling LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian media company that had been licensing the LiveJournal brand and software for use in Russia. The new owners unveiled a plan to upgrade the service, engage with the LiveJournal community and launch new products for advertisers. This work would be undertaken by the newly formed American-based company LiveJournal, Inc.

On January 6, 2009, it was announced that LiveJournal had laid off some of their San Francisco-based employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia.

On April 22, 2009, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev opened his own blog on the LiveJournal service.

Features

• Each journal entry has its own web page, which includes the comments left by other users. In addition, each user has a journal page, which shows all of his or her most recent journal entries, along with links to the comment pages.
• The most distinctive feature of LiveJournal is the “friends list,” which gives the site a strong social aspect in addition to the blog services. The friends list provides various syndication and privacy services as described below. Each user has a friends page, which collects the most recent journal entries of the people on his or her friends list.
• LiveJournal allows users to customize their accounts in several ways. The S2 programming language allows journal templates to be modified by members. Users may upload graphical avatars, or “userpics,” which appear next to the username in prominent areas as it would on an Internet forum. Paid account holders are given full access to S2 management and more userpics, as well as other features.
• Each user also has a “User Info” page, which contains a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources) and lists of friends, interests, communities and even schools which the user has attended in the past or is currently attending.
• LiveJournal also allows “voice posts” to their paid and sponsored users, where one can call into the system and record an entry.
• Currently LiveJournal has five account levels: basic (comprising approximately 95% of the network); plus (sponsored with advertising); “early adopters” who were registered prior to 14 September 2000; paid and permanent. Permanent accounts are normally not available to the “average user;” there have been occasional sale days or special offers, but such sales are not guaranteed in the future. Prior to March 12, 2008, “basic” accounts were ad-free; in August, 2008, LiveJournal resumed new basic account creation but changed that account level to display ads to non-logged-in readers.

Social networking

The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternary (with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can “friend” the other without reciprocation. On LiveJournal, “friend” is also used as a verb to describe listing someone as a friend.

The term “friend” on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term; however, because the term “friend” is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz, as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used in this way; this conflict is discussed in greater detail below.

A user’s list of friends (friends list, often shortened to flist) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users. Generally, “friending” allows the friends of a user to read protected entries and causes the friends’ entries to appear on the user’s “friends page.” Friends can also be grouped together in “friends groups,” allowing for more complex behavior in both of these features.

Privacy

LiveJournal provides an option intended to reduce the chances of search engines indexing a journal; however, the only way to make it completely impossible for such indexing to occur is setting the entry security to “friends only” or higher when first posting the entry. If an entry is first posted publicly, and then edited to reflect a higher security level, it may have already been indexed by a search engine in the time between the security edit. The popular “friends only” security option, which has since been adopted by Xanga and MySpace, hides a post from the general public so that only those on the user’s friends list can read it. Some users keep all their posts friends-only (except for a single post explaining that the journal is friends-only). LiveJournal also allows users to create custom user groups within their group of friends to further restrict who can read any particular post, and to allow easy reading of subsets of a user’s friends list.

LiveJournal additionally has a “private” security option which allows users to make a post that only the poster can read, thus making their LiveJournal a private diary rather than a blog. It is also possible to choose a default security setting for one’s journal, so that all entries are posted at that security level by default even if one forgets to alter the security setting at the time of posting.

Users may restrict who can comment on their posts in addition to who has the ability to read their posts. Comments on a given entry may be allowed from anyone who can read the entry or restricted. Commenting may be restricted by disabling commenting altogether or by screening comments. Screened comments are visible only to the original posters until the journal owner approves the comment. These restrictions can be applied to just anonymous users, users who aren’t listed as a friend, or everyone. The IP address of commenters can be logged as well if the journal owner wishes to enable it.

An option allows users to hide their ‘friend of’ list from public view, but leaves the list visible to the user. In this case, only the friends list is shown. When ‘friend of’ is allowed, journal accounts who have friended the user and who are also friended are listed in neither ‘friend of’ nor ‘friend’, but rather a third category, ‘mutual friends’. This was eventually made a separate option, like the ‘friend of’ list, and reworded so that the lists would have to be selected to include them in a profile, rather than to select an option to remove them.

LiveJournal lists that users can hide communities from their profile page by not friending them (friended communities are ‘watched’) and by either banning the community from posting in their journal (which has no effect since they cannot anyway, but does remove them from the ‘member of’ list) or by removing the ‘friend of’ list, which removes the ‘member of’ list in addition to the ‘friend of’ list.

LiveJournal allows paid account users to change privacy settings on past entries in bulk. Basic and plus accounts do not have an official web-based method, and normally must manually change such settings one by one; some third party clients, such as Livejournal Visibility Changer, provide this functionality for non-Paid users.