google plus is what i wanted livejournal to be

I spent many, many years caring about and caring for LiveJournal. One of our biggest challenges was figuring out how the site should evolve. Its age almost guaranteed that we had some sizable portion of the userbase using any given feature, which made it harder to retire features; our extraordinary ability to botch major announcements made us even more scared to do it. And the new stuff we were shipping didn't generally have a cohesive vision behind it. If it did, we'd be able to establish momentum behind that vision, and a better way of talking about it.

Anyway.

That chapter of my life has been over for a while now. Fast forward a bit.

Google+ isn't a great social network -- not many of my friends are on it -- but it's a fantastic service. But it's what I wished LiveJournal would have become. It's streamlined, but powerful. Think about it for a moment. Streams are like the friends page; circles are custom friend groups; photos are like a Scrapbook that worked; communities are like communities; +1s are memories; and so on. But it also eliminates a lot of the additional bells and whistles (like custom mood themes) that I think distracted us from our mission of connecting people. I'm not even counting the types of things that work because of Google's muscle -- better search, suggested friends, calendar integration, hangouts, etc.

Now, there is one or two things that Google+ is missing. Arguably, threaded comments is one of them, but I think the most important thing is personalization: owning your URL, customizing your theme/style, and selecting userpics for different posts or comments. Google+ is very clearly owned by Google, and the layout isn't very friendly to use. With that exception, though, Google+ provides exactly the set of features I think LiveJournal should. No more, no less.

The sense of community that LiveJournal created is what made it our home on the web, and Google+ is the first service I've seen that has the raw features to do the same thing. Tumblr doesn't do it, Twitter doesn't do it, Facebook comes close but it's not really emphasizing the written word as much, Wordpress doesn't do it, Typepad doesn't do it. Making the site easier to use would helped keep LiveJournal relevant instead of being relegated to being the great-grandfather of social media.

It makes me sad that we couldn't -- and that LiveJournal still can't -- evolve the site fast enough to keep up with the world. But that's why I'm hopeful for Google+, because I think something needs to pick up where LiveJournal left off.

Comments

[Therealdesh]

Isn't everything you said about G+ true about Facebook too, though? As for "emphasizing the written word", I'm not sure what you mean. I was bothered back when there were strict character limits on status updates, but now they're gone.

[Abe Hassan]

Hmm. I think the reason I exclude Facebook is that the newsfeed is status updates, activity updates, etc. Less about being a stream of your posts. Notes doesn't seem to be an often-used feature, and the status update box doesn't encourage long-form writing. So it's more geared towards "what's going on" rather than "what's on your mind". I think it has all the right features, but the emphasis is different.

[Therealdesh]

Certainly I don't think anything both encourages long-form writing and shows you a stream of other people's writing. If G+ does, then I should give it another shot. Even though most of my friends don't use it and even though, last I checked, it wasn't any better at encouraging long-form than Facebook is.

The LJ Friends page really was years ahead of its time.

[robbat2]

I was wondering about this yesterday, as I need to migrate my old LiveJournal content still. Mainly years of valuable technical posts.

Facebook is too much of a walled garden for moving the posts too.

But G+ is a reasonable compromise. Migration of the comments is the major thing to figure out.

[Hammond]

I definitely need to give more time to G+ but it falls off my radar as my local friends just don't use it :/