LiveJournal

LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is the name of a weblog site allowing Internet users to keep an online journal or diary. It is also the name of the open source server software that was designed to run it. LiveJournal's differences from other blogging sites include its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to Friendster.

Social networking

The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is binary (with only two possible states of connection between one user and another) and one-directional. Each user chooses a list of users they list as "friends".

Related Topics:
Social networking - Binary

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The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term; however, because the term 'friend" is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz, as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used in this way; this conflict is discussed in greater detail below.

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A user's list of friends (a.k.a. flist) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users. Generally, "friending" allows the friends of a user to read protected entries and causes the friends' entries to appear on the user's "friends page". Friends can also be grouped together in "friends groups", allowing for more complex behavior in both of these features.

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The dual usage of "friend" as those one reads and those one trusts doesn't necessarily match the definition of the word used in everyday speech. Even the individual users on a user's friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships, general interest, and courtesy (a user friending back someone who friended them). Sometimes a friends list represents something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection, a puzzle, or something random with no social significance whatsoever.

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The fact that "friend" is used, without qualification, to describe vastly different things in the LiveJournal community is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. This is intensified by the fact that "friending" and "defriending" (adding or removing another user from your Friends list) is as simple as clicking a button, while real life friendships are formed and unmade over longer periods of time. Since the friend concept on LiveJournal is unidirectional, any user can friend any other user. Many users are sensitive to being listed as a "friend of" a controversial user or someone whom they actively dislike. To combat this, a "ban" facility was created for users to hide others who have listed them as a friend http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=185.

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On April Fool's Day, 2004, the Livejournal staff pulled a prank on all users by changing the terms "friend" and "friend of" to "stalking" and "stalked by." Though many users wanted to keep these terms, it caused controversy, particularly with those who had been victims of stalking. http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/77588.html

Related Topics:
April Fool's Day - 2004

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Despite these problems, the word friend continues to be used to define these multi-faceted relationships on LiveJournal. This possibly reflects the designers' intent to have LiveJournal become more like an off-line community than some other purely on-line organizational structure.

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