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LiveJournal 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, but pre-dating, Friendster and MySpace. It is based in San Francisco, California.

LiveJournal was started in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.

The most distinguishing feature of LiveJournal is the "friends list", which gives the site a strong social aspect in addition to the blog services. The friends list provides various syndication and privacy services as described below.

LiveJournal allows users to customize their accounts in several ways. The S2 programming language allows journal templates to be modified by members. Users may upload graphical avatars, or "userpics", which appear next to the username in prominent areas as it would on an Internet forum. Paid account holders are given full access to S2 management and more userpics, as well as other features.

Each user also has a "User Info" page, which contains a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources), and lists of friends, interests, communities, and even schools which the user has attended in the past or is currently attending.

LiveJournal also allows "voice posts" to their paid and sponsored users, where one can call into the system and record an entry.

Currently LiveJournal has five account levels: free (comprising approximately 95% of the network); sponsored with advertising; "early adopters" who were registered prior to 2000; paid; and permanent. Permanent accounts are normally not available to the "average user"; there have been occasional sale days or special offers, but such sales are not guaranteed in the future.

"Sponsored with Advertising" accounts, whose status may be turned on or off at any given time by the (free) user, do not cost anything extra (the costs being supplemented by allowing advertising) and allow for some of the features normally reserved for paid and permanent accounts. These include more user icons (up to fifteen, as opposed to six for free accounts) and space on LiveJournal's own image-hosting site (one free gigabyte per user). The official name of the status was originally "Sponsored+", but was changed to "Plus".

(Source: Wikipedia, company website)

LiveJournalcom | Live Journal.com | wwwlivejournal | Blogs | Diaries