by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
The rumours are true. Movable Type owners, Six Apart, are buying the hugely popular LiveJournal blogging site. Andrew Girdwood
In the search engine optimisation world the first thing to watch on this merger is the mass addition of Trackback to LiveJournal. Two large internet hubs are about to become massively interlinked. Trackbacks are easily identifiable and Google is likely to be able to cope with this big shift in "Internet geography".
Brad Fitz of LiveJournal answers more questions in his news post at http://www.livejournal.com / users / news / 2005 / 01 / 05 /
Do I have to now use TypePad or Movable Type?
No. We're not migrating you or anything like that.
Why is the TOS and privacy policy changing?
Our old TOS and privacy policies apparently sucked, from a lawyer point-of-view. We never had lawyers create or really even review the old ones... they were just a hodge-podge of misc lawyer-sounding things people had collected over time. A lot of the things that were changed are actually now better for the users. We just needed to clean things up.
Does this mean I get free TypePad and MT?
Naah, no plans for that. They're seperate and isolated. Maybe down the road there will be some promo or something, but that's not what this deal was about.
Will LiveJournal become TypePad or TypePad become LiveJournal?
Nope. We have no plans of forceably merging the two sites and communities into one, either.... that just doesn't make sense.
Will LiveJournal stay open source?
The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source... And some new stuff that's infrastructure-related will probably also be released open source. We're all definitely pushing for it, and Six Apart "gets it" when it comes to open source. Of course there will be some closed parts... there are already some now. What I personally feel is important is making sure the infrastructure guts are available, so other people building new, creative websites will be able to focus on the fun stuff and not shelling out lots of money to commercial vendors for basic things like storage and load balancing.
