LiveJournal has been down for over 24 hours, not less than a week and a half after they got bought. Of course, the two have nothing to do with each other, but you have to think that at least a few of the 2.5 million active LJers are having their doubts. This has got to be extremely embarrassing for Six Apart. Oh, and PS... what's with the "9:12AM... We're back at it..."? I think if you're going to be serious about capturing the innermost thoughts of millions of LJers, you call in the reserves and you find some people who can spell you and work through the night. 12 hours? What kind of stamina is that? I stay at work longer the day before our internal strategy reviews. I'm sure there were plenty of LJers trying to post in the middle of the night who didn't shed a tear for the LJ team's 12 hour attempt. Kind of reminds me of the day AOL went out.
This goes back to the question of what exactly Six Apart bought. I would bet that free blogs are pretty far down on the stickyness list. Perhaps the "community" aspect is what will keep everyone on... the same reason most of us are still using AOL IM... only because everyone else we care about is still on it.
And what's going on here? Greatestjournal.com apparently has 700,000 members. I never even heard of them, but apparently they're using the LJ open source code. I have to be honest, after I saw this, I thought to myself, "I know a lot of LJers, but I don't know anyone on GJ." How easy would it be to put up a journaling site with LJ code, totally inflate the numbers of users, and try to get lots of people to donate to you? You could even write some fake blogs to make people think that there were lots of other people on there. Ok, maybe I'm just being cynical, but 700,000 bloggers seems like a big population to never hear of, especially when we were all commenting to death on the 6A-LJ merger. I don't think I'll believe that number unless I get 700,000 individual comments from GJers.