gossymer

This is very interesting. First of all, I had no idea there were so many accounts! And secondly, it's a bit worrying that so many seem to be abandoned or hardly used. I wonder if they have a way of leaving journals of dead LJ'ers out of the stats? They're most likely in there, but that would improve what we are looking at. A bit cynical, but true. If there are only 1.7 million who actively use their journals, then I think it's time to get worried. Personally I prefer LJ over any of the other services, though if I had to choose I think I'd go with GJ over IJ or DJ any day, but I see a lot of people transferring over to the other journal services. Especially the fic-writers.
I just hope the LJ-staff looks into this too and realize they need to change their TOS. LJ is an online service, not a dictator-ruled country, but the way they run things nowadays you'd be hard pressured to see the difference. *sigh*

I also had no idea there was an "invite only" period here a while back! I didn't join till the beginning of '07, so I was well away from the end of that, but it's interesting that they used that in a blogging community.

The accounts also cover feeds and comms (I think - its discussed in comments in those posts) so some numbers might actually be bloated. I do wonder about people who update their ljs in 60 or 90 days - because some might be on hiatus only temporarily or something.

It's sad that most newbies after signing up, won't know how to revert to basic to get rid of ads - its not obvious at all. And when there are so many alternative blogging sites, its easy to make the switch to something without ads if you're new and you don't have an incentive like fandom or comms of interest.

GJ it seems has already suffered its own death in a way - peaking in Aug last year and now being pretty inactive. This year probably was much better for LJ than the past year - but then we also have the arrival of bots and fake spamming accounts. So it's really hard to tell if anything has really improved D: Wish there was a bit more transperency but I guess from a business stand point LJ probably doesn't want competitors knowing certain info.

Damn, so its actually 2 or more variations of the style sheet with different themes. I'd only focussed on the ones with the "7" instead of the "7 comments" but I see what you mean. I wonder how far the differences go and whether an Unstyled theme would compensate for them in some way...

The good thing about working with Mixit so late was that there were already breakdowns and tutorials on the codes - so never even noticed it really!

I hate the thought of having to create overrides for multiple themes D: So if LJ provided an Unstyled theme for only one of the variations, if I didn't missed the other too much, I'd probably just focus on that for the time being *is lazy*

When I tried going unstyled and combining the base sheets into one for tweaking, lj blocked it due to 'ad position tampering' - so it probably needs a bit more analysis and getting rid of some code to get it to load on lj.

When I keep the style as is, overriding things gets very messy :(

I like the way we have "7" instead of "7 comments" in one variation, but then the other would let us put the edit, tags, mem links into a separate section like component (and in any case, I just do "7" on expressive on bloggish now, with images) so I can't really decide which to go with until I look at the code more

Yeah, I usually first set up a style in the developer area, and then load the base sheet in the Customise Journal area (mimicing free account). Then I save the html onto the computer for tweaking.

But LJ threw up errors when I tried linking to the css sheet on my server and just won't load it because of the ad issues D:

Everytime I visit your LJ or read one of your posts I get sidetracked to soooo many links and LJs and other interesting tidbits of information. It's highly educating.

However, I just wanted to point out that I've been around since 2002 when the invitation only thing existed - even over at deadjournal. At the time I was invited by my then college roommate, who still uses hers to this date.

However, I lost interest in LJ rather quickly for various reasons and moved on to Blogger and Xanga. I have a permanent account on Xanga because I have been posting on there since 2003 - granted most entries are private now since I converted it to my teacher!blog and all of my angsty!posts about college are hidden from public scruntiny.

I abandoned Blogger because of the non-user friendly aspects of it. I am quite possibly one of the most website challenged person around.

And in 2006 I came back to LJ - after four years of inactivity - to make it my personal blog about me, my life, my fandom, etc. I found that there was a hella lot of communities and woot! I haven't thought of leaving it since.

Granted, I might stop LJing for a while in the future but it's my little LJ and corner of the cyberworld.

I read the link to the LJ Death thingamabob...and I personally have to point out that I have a MySpace [but I don't remember my password] at the request of friends and dont use it. I have a Facebook but find it rather annoying and stalkerish.

The bottom line is that in today's society, there's TOO many social networking sites out there for LJ to claim a monopoly over. Hmm...that made no sense. What I meant is that there's too much stimulation. XD

Eh...that sounded worse. I hope I made sense.

In a nutshell, I wouldn't stress....

Yeah, some people have said that LJ is simply making a niche for itself i the current market and its too early to tell one way or another. Still, having constantly decreasing activity numbers can be worrying. It's nice to see its over 1 mill at the moment though.

The bubble for social networks seems to have burst (or at least facebook et all don't seem as crazy busy as they used to be) and LJ has survived and seems to be improving now. There's still the competition with other blogging services to contend with though. But neither them nor social networks have the sense of community lj does. And that's the hook. I hope its enough to keep lj going in the long term.

No matter how much wank I see on the lj design comm, I'm just happy they're posting 'cause it shows that things are getting done, one way or the other :)

(I usually make posts like this partly for future reference 'cause I never remember links otherwise - its more functional for me personally than bookmarks and del.icio.us XD)

Seems like it's stabilising. I'd like to know if the UI changes increase new user retention.

Ah man, I made that icon ages ago. It is pretty dorky. XD

I don't think live journal will ever die because it does cover a niche that normal blogging and sites like MySpace, Xanga and Facebook don't. Live journal is a blog site but then it's also a fandom community site. To me it's the best fandom community site out there (although I also like normal message boards). So while it might not be the most popular site I think it will stay because it does do things that it's competitors don't.

The other thing, actually, that this data doesn't track is the number of people on LJ clones that are posting in LJ and using LJ via openid. That is to say they're posting in other journals etc. via their openid's but are actually blogging at a clone. ~shrugs~

There's always been a high rate of attrition with LJ, it's either for you, or it isn't and that means you either make friends, post, and stick around for 5+ years, or you don't.

There's also something to be said for the relative age of the users. LJ's stats have always skewed towards the late-teens, early-twenties users and as those user age, get jobs, go to college, move out on their own etc., many of them are falling away from LJ and other social internet sites.

The fascinating thing to me is the huge spike, about 22k, at the age of 28. Looking at the data, LJ has a traditional bell curve that still encompasses those late-teen, early twenties years and then things fall steadily off until hitting 28 where there is a huge jump. That's interesting to me because LJ is shortly turning ten and I wonder how much of that spike in users at that age is actually people who've been with LJ since 1999, or, like myself, since the days of the invite codes, who've actually stayed with the site.

I also find the slowly, but steadily, increasing number of users in their thirties+ that is interesting. I'm also intrigued by the jump of 20k between users 37 and users that are 38.

Thanks for bringing this up! You got me off on memory lane, but you also got me thinking about other things and I don't do nearly of that stuff these days! :D

Taken from the site:
"How many users, and how many of those are active?

* Total accounts: 17397920
* ... active in some way: 1919539
* ... that have ever updated: 10236656
* ... updating in last 30 days: 1047130
* ... updating in last 7 days: 586551
* ... updating in past 24 hours: 212041"

I think it's fascinating that nearly half of people that have update in the past 7 days have also updates in the past 24 hours. That speaks volumes about a potentially smaller, but also very active base and there's nothing wrong with that. :D