Changes to urls. Big mistake by livejournal.com
This is something I don't understand. One of the major players in the field of weblog hosting makes a big change in url management (username.livejournal.com instead of www.livejournal.com/users/username):
"Recent changes to a popular browser have enabled malicious users to potentially gain control of your account. As soon as we heard about it, we began implementing changes to protect your account, and this is one of the last steps of the required changes. The rest will be happening in the next few days. We'll post to our development journal with more in-depth details about these changes."
Recent changes to a popular browser ? It sounds weird. What changes you are talking about, what browser ? It is a common knowledge that livejournal.com has a community of something over 9 million users. Many of these people take their journal seriously, build the community and traffic around their weblog for years. There are lots of professional journalists writing. Some journals are extremely popular gaining pageranks 6 and 7 and having thousands of unique visitors per day. Now they have to start all over again.
Like said: "Letting somebody else own your name means that they own your destiny on the Internet.". It's true for all users who use this or another popular weblog service and take their weblog seriously. Pageranks already dropped, I notice. Ok, it's true that livejournal.com uses permanent redirects to navigate to the new urls and that search engines know how to deal with permanent redirects, but what about links and bookmarks and users whose name starts or ends with dash or underscore ?
"You will not have to change your username, but if you'd like to change it we will offer you one rename (per username beginning or ending with a dash or underscore) for free."
For free, man. They don't even charge money for this. Amused.
Friday, January 20, 2006 4:31 PM
