Social networking and blogging site LiveJournal has a new owner. Parent company Six Apart announced on Monday that Live Journal has been sold to SUP, a Russian online media company.
SUP said that it has launched an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., for global management. Financial details of the deal were not announced.
LiveJournal and SUP are not strangers. SUP has managed LiveJournal in Russia since October of last year, and the company said that it is so popular there that “LiveJournal” has become synonymous in Russian with “blogging.”
Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart, praised SUP. He said in a statement that, in its Russian version, SUP has “introduced new features, nearly doubled the number of users, invested in key product enhancements,” and has done “justice to one of the most innovative online social networks in the world.”
LiveJournal’s Future?
For users who might be worried about LiveJournal’s future direction, Alden noted that SUP would be setting up an advisory board “to oversee the community’s interests.”
And for those developers who are concerned about new ownership for one of the leaders in open-source development for such sites, Six Apart said it will continue active investment in those technologies and LiveJournal will continue the tradition. The technologies include Memcached, Mogile, Perlbal, and OpenID, which Six Apart said have been adopted by such sites as Craigslist, Facebook, and Wikipedia.
There are many bloggers and blog readers who wonder how this acquisition will affect the state of blogs in Russia. According to an article in February of this year in The Nation, Russian “bloggers are becoming a lively alternative to mainstream media” and can make or break a politician’s career.
In particular, it noted that Zhivoi Zhurnal, the “Russian incarnation” of LiveJournal, is frequently read by professional newspeople in that country, and has 12 million users….