LiveJournal Leaves Six Apart, Joins SUP And Makes Its Own Company

For all you LiveJournal lovers out there, big news from the mothership: LiveJournal is leaving Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, Vox, and TypePad, and joining forces with SUP (a company I'd never heard of before):

Six Apart, the world's leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities. SUP has launched an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

This agreement builds on the established and successful relationship between Six Apart and SUP, which entered into a licensing agreement in October 2006 permitting SUP to manage LiveJournal in Russia. The Russian LiveJournal community is second only to the U.S. in number of accounts, and has been influential enough in that country to make "LiveJournal" synonymous with "blogging" in Russian.

Apparently, the folks at LiveJournal felt that Six Apart was too big and multi-focused and so wasn't serving the interests of the LiveJournal community. The new company managed by SUP, they say, will help by having an American company completely focused on LiveJournal itself.

I've had a LiveJournal account since 2001, back when it was less than 500k users (I'm user #410,683) and have watched it grow from that to over 15 million users. I've since moved on to professional blogging using Movable Type on my own site (MT also powers the GayGamer family of sites), but still maintain my LJ for my personal day to day journaling.

If there's one thing I know, it's that LiveJournal has gone through many changes and will probably go through many more. Its users are strong and dedicated, so this news should cause no worry amongst the community.

I have to agree with the press release and say a dedicated company is the best solution for LiveJournal. I had always wondered why Six Apart bought LiveJournal in the first place. Movable Type and TypePad use the same back-end, while Vox was already a second type of blog system they were trying to manage. To add a third type of blogging system under the same company seemed like they were spreading their attention a little too thinly, and it seems LiveJournal and Six Apart have come to the same conclusion.

Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal [LiveJournal]