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LJ rant [Nov. 27th, 2004|09:21 pm]
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[info]centralasian@lj writes "Does journal-writing foster a sterile self-absorption that is a waste of the writer's time?"

The stupidity of LJ as an information system is driving me fucking nuts!
In their fifth year of evolution all they've got in terms of personal information management is one of the most primitive calendars, a very cumbersome bookmark "memories" mechanism, and the pathetic "view by subject". There's no freaking way
1) to have your own information automatically categorized;
2) to easily see what your friends wrote on a specific day;
3) to automatically insert references in your own journal if you post in a community;
4) to archive;
5) to spacially structure friendlist information;
and etc..

The whole system is designed as a big sack of recorded chat sessions. And the worst thing is that during the last two years I've managed to put lots of quality information in and now I cannot get it out. What a fucking black hole!
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Comments:
[User Picture]
From:[info]pggmilltn@lj
Date:November 27th, 2004 - 05:58 pm
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Maybe you can see about volunteering to help develope the system further?
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From:[info]watertank@lj
Date:November 27th, 2004 - 06:03 pm
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I am not a software developer.
[User Picture]
From:[info]centralasian@lj
Date:November 27th, 2004 - 10:58 pm
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You don't *have to* be a software developer to develop the system further. You need to be a good thinker willing to think about these issues.
[User Picture]
From:[info]watertank@lj
Date:November 28th, 2004 - 05:44 am
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Unfortunately this is not always true. Good thinkers are great in an environment where thinking leads to doing. By the way this is one of the major differences between invention and innovation.
My previous communications with the LJ team and lj_biz monitoring show that they lack resources and/or desire to receive "pure" thinking from outside. They often say, "Since you are so smart, can you do it for us?". Moreover, their innovation efforts tend to go into (and therefore limited by) system performance improvements.
On the other hand the Blogger.com team seems to be capable of leveraging Google's distributed processing experience and focus on features. Which is a lot more promising direction for a user like myself.
From:[info]loiner@lj
Date:November 27th, 2004 - 11:37 pm
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Agree, the whole business looks amateurish. But then it has a lot of free stuff. It either dies or evolves into something more elitist. The same pattern can be seen with posting preprints in the ArXiv, but it has got a nicer search facility. The organizational principle is not clear. As it stands, it is not a business venture, but has to become such to self-develop. Which essentially means changing more, but for what?
[User Picture]
From:[info]i@lj
Date:November 28th, 2004 - 02:53 am
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i use the memories function as a sort of archive. i don't do it very effectively, but it seems like it would be possible.