Starts out with half of the San Francisco office personnel being laid off in one week, with no advance warning and no severance, including personnel like janinedog and chasethestars, who have always been nothing but kind and courteous and helpful to us here out of nothing but their love of all things LJ. There might be more detailed posts on this subject to come, as information becomes less sensitive. In the meantime, I will collect links to public posts that I consider notable; feel free to suggest any by commenting here or through other means. (Note: Valleywag's original numbers of 20 out of 28 let go, and those citing them, are not accurate. The true numbers I hear are more like 13 let go, 17 kept in total, and 12 let go and 12 kept in SF--in total, around 20% of LJ staff according to their PR correspondents. Always be skeptical of Valleywag.)

Our condolences to everyone.

Confirmed lost:

chasethestars (Design -- Visual and Interactive Designer), janinedog (Engineering -- Software Engineer), gregorykennedy (Design -- Global Creative Director), lizlux (Design -- Web Designer), gorman (Product -- Product Manager), kazwell (Product -- Product Manager), mberardo, tiko_san (Product -- Head of Project Management), james (Engineering -- Software Engineer), wfinley (Operations -- Senior Director of Operations), sonman (Operations -- Senior Enterprise Architect), mariat_george (Operations -- Senior Enterprise Architect)

Known remaining:

tupshin (Engineering -- Director of Development), coffeechica (Customer Service -- Technical Support Manager), marta (Customer Service -- Community Relations Manager), astronewt (Customer Service -- Customer Support Representative), arie (Customer Service -- Accounts Manager), henrylyne (Engineering -- Software Engineer), urban_yogi (Product -- Director of Product Management), sunrise_bee, dwell (Operations -- Manager of Operations), nicholaskurjan (Senior Systems Administrator), mhwest (Operations -- Linux Systems Administrator), joemacf (Director of Editorial Content and Community Care), markf (Customer Service -- Abuse Manager), slikrikk (Administration -- Office Manager), sgravelle (Director of Finance and Administration), lyndaellen (Editorial -- Editorial Manager), katfaw (Administration -- Accounting Manager)

Official Commentary

Official Press Release -- "valued colleagues" are "leaving the company". Nice PR speak, there.
Twitter: "LJers! Don't worry, the news of our demise is premature.Yes, there were layoffs, but that does not affect your LJ! http://tinyurl.com/9rzk5y" Oh, classy. Salt, meet wound. This is an official Twitter account. "My" LJ won't die from this, it's true, but the layoffs certainly affect it.
chasethestars in lj_design, saying goodbye -- It's still official, dammit, and I like it better than the other two posts.
gorman in teamlj -- LJ employees making gallows humor and staff pages with X's printed out. Considered official to balance out that dreadful Twitter post.

During Wednesday's emergency maintenance outage:

LiveJournal.com is currently unavailable due to emergency maintenance. Don't worry, this has nothing to do with our recent company layoffs! It's a technical problem, not a lack-of-personnel problem.

Thank you for your patience.

The news post, 48 hours later.

Onsite Commentary

xb95 -- Rest In Peace (significant other a casualty of the layoffs; one of the heads of Dreamwidth)
idonotlikepeas -- sup, LJ, layoffs, and such (Support member, some analysis, links to backup)
azurelunatic -- Support means just that. (one perspective from the broader Support community)
synecdochic -- FYI (former employee, one of the heads of Dreamwidth)
scrottie -- LJ itself (one perspective on value of the people let go and buying companies in tech bubbles)

Offsite Commentary

ValleyWag -- The Russian Bear Slashes a Social Network (Misleading numbers silently corrected late Tuesday.)
CNet -- LiveJournal confirms layoffs, says rumored numbers exaggerated
Alley Insider: Livejournal Implodes: Staff Let Go* -- Claim to have been told lies by LJ spokespeople: "LJ laid off about a dozen employees, which is less than 20% of the entire LJ workforce. And contrary to some online gossip sites, LiveJournal employees leaving the business as a result of the restructuring are receiving comprehensive support from the company." Bold part is, so far, a lie. I hope it becomes the truth.
paidcontent.org -- LiveJournal Lays Off San Francisco Staff, Will Operate From Moscow -- "In July, Paulson told paidContent.org that LiveJournal traffic had doubled since the acquisition but the San Francisco team was being retained for proximity to Silicon Valley’s development pool. Indeed, it hired Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) product manager Berardo away to run LiveJournal’s US ops."

We've spotted a code change that adds what appears to be a web bug (since the code returns the HTML for a 1x1 image) for each RSS post in SUP journal feeds; the image uses the SUP_BASE_ADCALL_URL, so although it may not have anything to do with ads, it seems to involve the ad server in some way. It's conceivable this will be used to give SUP users statistics on readers of their RSS feeds.

On an unrelated front, the previously mentioned Dreamwidth is looking for mood themes (mailing list post). They are also looking for a site copy editor and FAQ team.

You would be interested in this http://community.livejournal.com/sup_ru/374846.html

Soon SUP will start testing a new type of account called "Sponsored account". The user who selects such an account type will have all the functionality of a paid account without paying (it will be paid by the advertiser). In return the user's profile will feature the advertiser's banner, and the journal will feature the advertiser's style. If an advertiser has a sponsored community, the user will be automatically added to it. The user can choose the advertiser and the advertiser's style that s/he likes.

Testing period starts within a month. People will be able to leave comments and suggestions. Then the offer will be made available to all Russian users, and later after appropriate agreements are signed abroad, the functionality will be available to all users.

--
in comments, there are clarifications that the Paid users will not see the advertisers' banners on Sponsored accounts, but will see the advertisers' styles. ?style=mine however will still override the advertisers' styles.

Edit: there are a couple of other interesting comments now. In particular, when you select a sponsor there will be a period of time during which you can decide whether you like the sponsor or not. Afterwards, you will not be able to switch account type or choose another sponsor for 3 months. Another tidbit is that sponsors will be able to refuse to sponsor you (if for instance you comment negatively about them).

Not sure is that interview was already translated (http://www.izbrannoe.info/30184.html -- original interview in Russian).

A CAVE WILL BE PROVIDED TO ALL WILLING

( Read more... )

A post has been made about an article has been made on the recent Basic discontinuation by thies (post deleted by user). The article is here.

( Ad notable quotes. Which, come to think of it, is most of it, really )

Alright this is gossip, I apologize ahead of time, but this link says what SUP paid for LJ

http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/politics/28.html?id_issue=11921892

I will not repeat the news, as I am sure everybody already knows it. I want to say, however, that in Russian segment of LJ (which is second biggest after English) there is a strong opinion that the deal was planned to come through exactly after the parliamentary elections in Russia, so all the Russian blogosphere would discuss the fact of sale of LJ and not the unfair elections.

In my own experience, SUP doesn't work all that smoothly - my own blog is in Russian, although I live in Los Angeles at the moment. When SUP took over the Cyrillic segment of LJ, I started seeing a lot of ads for Russian products and services, in spite of having a paid account! Needless to say, it was quite an effort to opt out of SUP, by some mean irony of fate, it was completely futile, as SUP now owns all of LJ.

a lot of Russian LJ users all over the world are already talking of leaving LJ alltogether, as they are afraid about their privacy.

Just one more little detail - the Wikipedia article about LiveJournal is locked to free editing :)

LiveJournal is sold to SUP. Considering some of SUP's past actions (claiming to be opt in and instead being a very difficult opt out, etc), this frightens me, despite the reassurances. They've done a calming talk before doing a stompy walk before.

I actually trust 6A more than SUP--better the devil you know--and am a bit disappointed that this happened so soon after David was hired to do interesting things with opening up social networks.

On the other hand, they have plans for an Advisory Committee and probably have more of a genuine interest in LJ than 6A now that Vox has matured.

#1: One interesting thing about the new mass opt in is all syndicated accounts now have Snap.com on them--and since nobody owns those, nobody can turn them off. This might end up being the way to monotenize syndicated accounts with ads.

#2: As of yet, it does not work so well with SUP's site scheme, which has links to its external sites.

SUP and Last.fm partner up.

To make it short - user vedmouse had some problems with counter from ljplus.ru. She wrote SUP asking to fix the problem. And just the other day checking counter's logs she notices that someone logged into her LJ from SUP IP (screenshot). After putting supmaker before the fact of unauthorized access SUP came up with excuse saying that they got the LJ login-password from ljplus.ru website [there's a place to save it for easier use of ljplus functions] and used it to fix the problem with the counter. Also supmaker assured that this will never happen again and that they are making steps to better protect users info [and educate their dev team on basic ethics?] and very sorry for not informing the user that they accessed her LJ without authorization from the user.

So the conclusion - if you use SUP service ljplus.ru and saved your LJ login info in their system, you are giving away your password to any curious member of SUP company.

evil_lack_shoe -:

I will try.

Just now deleted some of my friends. Friends, 1000 friend owners. Who's decided to warn us about SUP (russian part of LJ), trying to sell right to read our locked posts.
I hate that cheap PR. And now they decided, by using circle link, hided beyond hot fake news, make me click most of 1000 friend owners LJ users.

I'm quite weak in english, so ask if something is unreadable =)

From a comment made in the most recent paidmembers post; I suspect that it's something innocent like contextual content-based ads surrounding F-only posts, which is pretty much what sponsored users sign up for anyway, but it could be something worse.

Can one of our Russian speaking contingent either give a better translation and/or reassure me and steve_savicki who brought it to my attention?

Well basically the subj.

Since yesterday paid users who are in SUP see this nice ad in the right upper corner



Since LiveJourna.RU is not a service offered by 6Apart or LiveJournal it is an advertisement of third-party company. SUP claims that this is just an announcement of new services. However at the same time they are saying that LJ Paid Users will still see advertisements on LiveJournal.RU since it's not 6A project but a website owned and ran by SUP Fabrik and noone paid SUP not to see ads. So now they are integrating LJ.RU services on our LJ and users soon will have to watch what services are from SUP and what from 6A so not to see ads. This is how it looks on website (screenshot).

Of course you can opt-out from SUP and don't get the ads but the idea of Paid Users not seeing advertisements is long gone.

I just got final answer on my question "Does LJ.RU and Kommersant have access to my LJ cookies?"

The answer is:
No, they do not have access to your LiveJournal cookies.

Regards,
  LiveJournal Support Team
My request ticket: http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=748609 (it's private so you can't see it)

At the same time I'm getting bugs pointing that i'm one leg in SUP again.

1. I see SUP-only gifts in giftshop
2. If I try to use mobile services (http://www.livejournal.com/manage/mobile.bml) I get redirected to (http://www.livejournal.com/sup/mobile.bml) and get the following error:

Мобильные сервисы (trans: Mobile Services)
One or more errors occurred processing your request. Please go back, correct the necessary information, and submit your data again.

I've created a ticket on Support Board (already pvt and in SUP Services) and posted the same question in lj_ru_support.

I know it's a bit irrelevant to this community but I want to document everything and make it as public as possible.

Hi guys,

I've got my replies from..eeeh...whoever answered them on the board.

First, My SUP Opt-Out question:



And this is my Kommersant+Livejournal.RU request:


How do you like that? I won't be eligible for extra SUP service like there will be some special services for SUP users and the rest of cyrillic users will only get ads from SUP. Do they think that I'm retarded or something?! This is the highest level of disrespect ever! I think SUP management was formed from US used-car salesmen!

And to clarify things about LiveJournal.RU - it is owned and created by SUP. Basically it has all the futures plus extras of ljplus.ru (which is also was bought by SUP). And yes they are planning to integrate LJ.RU services into our LJ. For ex. that means you guys will be using scrapbook and I'll be force to use lj.RU photohosting.

And most recent news: New Marketing Director for SUP is....Benjamin Berr-Prosser o.O (Link in russian) I think most people know who he is - before this position he was responsible for strategic communitcations in Tony Blair's administration.

UPD: All this was confirmed by supmaker   in [info]sup_ru  . They just couldn't leave alone people who opt-out from SUP and from now on you get russian ads not because you are in SUP but because you write in russian. It's just targeted advertisement. :) And SUP has nothing to do with it because this is 6A who decided to show russian ads to non-SUP cyrillic users from "ads.sup.com"