May 1, 2009 - 8:00am
This month one of the most popular web portals LiveJournal celebrates its tenth anniversary. Originated on April 15, 1999, it powers a network of blogs, Web forums, social networking and content aggregation. For the majority of Americans the Live Journal became a part of their everyday life. LJ is mostly popular among the users from English-speaking countries, with 67% of the total grabbed by almost 4mn of US users. Live Journal is a virtual community where users can keep a blog, journal or diary. This network enables a person to create a virtual word that reflects his beings and became a virtual peace of the person’s reality.
But who was the pioneer of the social networking? Who have provided an opportunity to people to find each other, even if they are thousands kilometers far from each other, who gave them a chance to communicate, to discuss some problems, to place their pictures on the web? Brad Fitzpatrick. Yes, the majority of Americans knows exactly the name of this person that gave people such a convenient communicating and blogging web site. He made Internet more interesting and entertaining, encouraging the further development of blogs and social networking services. He’s popular in the web under
bradfitz nickname. LiveJournal is not the only project of this American programmer, there is a variety of other free software projects such as memcached, notably used on LiveJournal, Facebook and YouTube. Actually, Brad Fitzpatrick‘s main idea for the creation of the LifeJournal was an intention to keep in touch with his high school friends and to keep them updated on his activities. Thus the portal, that was started up as a hobby project for University of Washington in Seattle grew into a popular tool for college students to chronicle their daily lives. Today the service runs on an open-source platform.
This guy became famous early enough at the age of nineteen when he was a student of the University. His first project, an Internet voting site, Brad has launched even earlier, at the age of 16. He was diarizing online since 1997. And once, he decided it would be great if his friends would be able not only to read his notes, but create and keep their own diaries as well. So in 1999 Brad registered livejornal.com domain and launched its service. His idea of cross reading and commenting appeared to be very successful and today LiveJournal has more than 11.5mn accounts registered, including a number of famous people, politicians, writers, etc.
Fitzpatrick implemented innovations into an already known blog service scheme. Thus he represented the idea of friend pages, pages that enable users to easily view the recent journal updates of their LiveJournal friends. Additionally, with LiveJournal, users can have custom control over who can view their journal posts as well as join interest-based communities. Paid members are enabled to have access to additional features including additional image uploads, faster access, and the ability to post by email or phone. The LiveJournal service is free, but a premium version is available for $25 a year.
Later LiveJournal became a full-time job for Brad and then a company, which he called Danga Interactive. In January 2005, Fitzpatrick sold Danga to Six Apart, for an undisclosed sum of cash and stock, according to www.eweek.com. It used to be a small company, but a bit bigger than Danga and with more direction. This acquisition appeared to become a major boost for Six Apart in the blog publishing business and a legitimate shot at staying relevant in the face of stiff competition from Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. So, Six Apart automatically becomes a big player, having LiveJournal added to its portfolio of blog software products. As for Fitzpatrick, he joined the company as the chief architect. It seems to be strange: he sold his business that originally was potentially successful, instead of running it himself and make huge profits. But he explained this decision easily: according to his words, he loved technology and designing the LiveJournal architecture but he hated running a business.
However On December 3, 2007 Six Apart, failing to spin, announced it’s intention to sell 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. But, Fitzpatrick, having devoted to its creation nine years, left Six Apart earlier, in August 2007, naming a need to move on to different projects as the reason of his resignation. He had not been active in LiveJournal's development for about two years. And in 2008 he returned to LiveJournal, joining LiveJournal Advisory Board. Today he successfully works for Google.
Having millions of people attracted to his portal, Fitzpatric is not to stop his creative activity, desiring to advance the social network system and perfect links. Thus his last idea was to unite social networks existing in the Web, by creating social graphs:
Thus he is developing his idea of connecting people that have the accounts on different social network portals, like Twitter, Facebook and others, giving a start to a next in turn Internet revolution. The wider description of the new Google based API social graphs you can find here: http://code.google.com/intl/ru/apis/socialgraph/docs. As for Brad’s own opinion and thoughts concerning his latest project, look http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem. To be brief, Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful. The newest service makes it easy for users to bring their existing social connections into a new website and as a result, users are supposed to spend less time rebuilding their social networks and more time connecting with a person from the different social network they’d love to.
Well, bradfitz, being a very creative person, whose mind is always full of innovatory ideas regarding Internet development, will definitely amaze us soon again. He wishes social networks was completely perfected, he wants people to be able to connect via the Internet with no obstacles and no borders. In the nearest future we’ll exactly hear not once about this guy. His activity on social network development shows him to be an Internet revolutionary, doesn’t it?
But who was the pioneer of the social networking? Who have provided an opportunity to people to find each other, even if they are thousands kilometers far from each other, who gave them a chance to communicate, to discuss some problems, to place their pictures on the web? Brad Fitzpatrick. Yes, the majority of Americans knows exactly the name of this person that gave people such a convenient communicating and blogging web site. He made Internet more interesting and entertaining, encouraging the further development of blogs and social networking services. He’s popular in the web under
bradfitz nickname. LiveJournal is not the only project of this American programmer, there is a variety of other free software projects such as memcached, notably used on LiveJournal, Facebook and YouTube. Actually, Brad Fitzpatrick‘s main idea for the creation of the LifeJournal was an intention to keep in touch with his high school friends and to keep them updated on his activities. Thus the portal, that was started up as a hobby project for University of Washington in Seattle grew into a popular tool for college students to chronicle their daily lives. Today the service runs on an open-source platform.This guy became famous early enough at the age of nineteen when he was a student of the University. His first project, an Internet voting site, Brad has launched even earlier, at the age of 16. He was diarizing online since 1997. And once, he decided it would be great if his friends would be able not only to read his notes, but create and keep their own diaries as well. So in 1999 Brad registered livejornal.com domain and launched its service. His idea of cross reading and commenting appeared to be very successful and today LiveJournal has more than 11.5mn accounts registered, including a number of famous people, politicians, writers, etc.
Fitzpatrick implemented innovations into an already known blog service scheme. Thus he represented the idea of friend pages, pages that enable users to easily view the recent journal updates of their LiveJournal friends. Additionally, with LiveJournal, users can have custom control over who can view their journal posts as well as join interest-based communities. Paid members are enabled to have access to additional features including additional image uploads, faster access, and the ability to post by email or phone. The LiveJournal service is free, but a premium version is available for $25 a year.
Later LiveJournal became a full-time job for Brad and then a company, which he called Danga Interactive. In January 2005, Fitzpatrick sold Danga to Six Apart, for an undisclosed sum of cash and stock, according to www.eweek.com. It used to be a small company, but a bit bigger than Danga and with more direction. This acquisition appeared to become a major boost for Six Apart in the blog publishing business and a legitimate shot at staying relevant in the face of stiff competition from Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. So, Six Apart automatically becomes a big player, having LiveJournal added to its portfolio of blog software products. As for Fitzpatrick, he joined the company as the chief architect. It seems to be strange: he sold his business that originally was potentially successful, instead of running it himself and make huge profits. But he explained this decision easily: according to his words, he loved technology and designing the LiveJournal architecture but he hated running a business.
However On December 3, 2007 Six Apart, failing to spin, announced it’s intention to sell 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. But, Fitzpatrick, having devoted to its creation nine years, left Six Apart earlier, in August 2007, naming a need to move on to different projects as the reason of his resignation. He had not been active in LiveJournal's development for about two years. And in 2008 he returned to LiveJournal, joining LiveJournal Advisory Board. Today he successfully works for Google.
Having millions of people attracted to his portal, Fitzpatric is not to stop his creative activity, desiring to advance the social network system and perfect links. Thus his last idea was to unite social networks existing in the Web, by creating social graphs:
Thus he is developing his idea of connecting people that have the accounts on different social network portals, like Twitter, Facebook and others, giving a start to a next in turn Internet revolution. The wider description of the new Google based API social graphs you can find here: http://code.google.com/intl/ru/apis/socialgraph/docs. As for Brad’s own opinion and thoughts concerning his latest project, look http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem. To be brief, Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful. The newest service makes it easy for users to bring their existing social connections into a new website and as a result, users are supposed to spend less time rebuilding their social networks and more time connecting with a person from the different social network they’d love to.
Well, bradfitz, being a very creative person, whose mind is always full of innovatory ideas regarding Internet development, will definitely amaze us soon again. He wishes social networks was completely perfected, he wants people to be able to connect via the Internet with no obstacles and no borders. In the nearest future we’ll exactly hear not once about this guy. His activity on social network development shows him to be an Internet revolutionary, doesn’t it?