[META] Livejournal, Livejournal

[rfmcdonald]

Something like two dozen people on my friends news reported news of the job cuts to Livejournal which, CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports, are not quite as bad as first reported.

Social-media pioneer LiveJournal is the latest company to announce a round of layoffs, trimming down its employee head count in its San Francisco and Moscow offices.

A statement from the company came after a rumor on gossip blog Gawker suggested that a shocking number of LiveJournal employees--20 out of 28--had been cut. LiveJournal clarified that it was "about a dozen" cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

"LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration, and the customer service teams will remain in the United States," the release explained. "LiveJournal's global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the U.S. and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal."

Yahoo veteran Matthew Berardo, who was hired as general manager of the service less than a year ago, was affected by the layoff.

LiveJournal was founded nearly a decade ago by OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who sold the company to blog software firm Six Apart. But that led to widespread reports of management difficulties, and late in 2007, Six Apart resold LiveJournal, phenomenally popular in Russia, to the Moscow-based software company SUP.

I'm finally being sensible and using ljArchive to save the 5965 posts made over nearly seven years--preceding this one, of course--and zarq linked to this poster who provides instructions for backing up a Livejournal onto a Greatestjournal or some such LJ clone for continued interactivity. I haven't done that, yet. I don't have any backups elsewhere, on Blogspot or Wordpress and I haven't used my Twitter account ("rfmcdpei," naturally) at all, but I am on Facebook.