Six Apart Drops LiveJournal
Not sure who else will care about this.
I doubt most of my readers will care too much about this, but I do sort of follow what goes on at Six Apart. They were the first real blog company, I think. They made the first blogging software I used, MovableType, and, really, they were around before just about anyone else. As a company, they’ve contributed quite a bit to the blogging world, beyond their software. In short, I keep an eye on them because they’re one of the big players in the blog world.
In any case, according to this story on ZDnet, they’ve sold LiveJournal to a Russian online media company called SUP. They, apparently, are making a few changes, but the overall attitude seems to be a positive one. Personally, I wonder what made Six Apart sell LiveJournal. I don’t use it myself, but I read a couple of blogs that are on LiveJournal so I’m passingly familiar with them. I doubt that LJ made any big money for Six Apart, but, then, I didn’t think that was why they acquired them in the first place. At the time, I thought it was to convert people from LJ to Six Apart’s MovableType-based service, TypePad. Now, though, I wonder if that was it at all. If they were after some technology that LJ had, what would it have been? And, now that they have it, why dump LJ?
Not sure what’s going on there, but, no matter how you feel about Six Apart, they’re pretty savy when it comes to business and blogging, so they likely have a pretty good reason for their decision to sell LiveJournal. And, just as likely that none of us regular joes will ever know what it is.
