I was reading the other day about how Livejournal went down because of some massive server failure among their hundred servers or whatever. I tried to go there today and just got a blank page. That's nice stuff. When it finally appeared it was slow as hell.
Internet success stories interest me. LJ is certainly a success story, and it's neat to see the "little guy" rise above. Still, it's also a story of being in the right place at the right time, and that irks me. A group of people I worked with and I thought up Salesforce.com years before it became a reality, but never had the support to make it happen. In other words, I hate when good ideas come to fruition despite poor implementation.
I found some documents on how LJ is set up, and quite frankly it looks like a horrible system. I've read too many case studies about systems that do far more with less hardware. Maybe it's the software. Maybe it's the platform. I wouldn't know. I do know that giving stuff away for the sake of being popular might feel good, but it certainly doesn't pay the bills.
Why do I care? I dunno, I guess it's because I see Six Apart buying the company and I can't stop scratching my head. I absolutely don't get how they expect to monetize the thing. Maybe I just wish someone would throw a bunch of cash at me for something I did (hey, popworld.com scored me $100k, so you never know). I'm also irritated by them because they constantly wear the words "open source" on their sleeve like it entitles them to a medal of recognition or something. Oh, and they use Perl. Honestly... in this day and age, doesn't that seem stone age to you? I'm not usually one for platform religion, but it's not exactly a platform for a massive enterprise like that.
Personally, I'd be scared to see LJ's source code. Perl does indeed have its place, but it amazes me how far some people take it these days.
LJ went down because there was a power failure. Yes, they are now buying better UPS's to prevent such in the future.
LJ does run slowly at times, generally in the early evenings when there are more people logged in.
But I like it as a non-techie. It was extremely easy to customize my pages (and being a non-techie that was a good thing).
I can create filter lists which allows me to pick and choose who sees the entries, use different icons in my entries based upon my moods, and frankly, a LOT of my on-line friends use it. During very busy times at work when I can't keep up with my friends on IM, I can keep up from their postings on LJ.
Obviously those who are more technically inclined can see the faults. But your run of the mill general user who has no clue is only interested in ease of use and features.
And, of course, you can use it for free (for now, anyway).