Industry Buzz via Twitter

We believe this is a great opportunity," said Andrew Paulson, CEO of international media company SUP, as it was announced today that Six Apart - which acquired LiveJournal in January 2005 from its founder, Brad Fitzpatrick - has sold LJ to Moscow-based SUP. SUP has launched an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

"Judging both by SUP's track record and their eagerness to create a new user advisory board to oversee the community's interests, this is clearly a good fit," stated Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart. "We have a tremendous respect for the LiveJournal community," Alden continued, "and are pleased to see that LiveJournal, Inc. will continue to build on LiveJournal's rich user experience."

He added:

"We have been impressed by the expertise and enthusiasm that SUP has brought to LiveJournal in Russia. They've introduced new features, nearly doubled the number of users, invested in key product enhancements, and have done justice to one of the most innovative online social networks in the world."

"Having gotten to know LiveJournal in Russia over the past year, we see enormous potential in developing the business worldwide; it has already shown its durability in America," stated Paulson. 

From its founding, LiveJournal popularized many of the fundamental innovations of social media, such as friends lists and powerful privacy controls. Under Six Apart, the number of LiveJournal accounts nearly tripled from 5 million to over 14 million, and dozens of new features were introduced to the site, including:

• a powerful email/IM/web notification system;
• LJTalk, a completely open-source Jabber-based instant messaging platform;
• user-to-user messaging and tremendous improvements in comment management and editing;
• a vastly expanded mobile feature set, including a dedicated mobile client; and
• dozens of new visual themes and a completely new, simplified site design and navigation system.

Six Apart will continue its active investment in and promotion of the signature open source platform technologies created by the LiveJournal team, such as Memcached, Mogile, Perlbal, and OpenID, all of which have been adopted by other leading web properties from Craigslist to Facebook to Wikipedia.

The move seems likely to bring Brad Fitzpatrick back into the LJ limelight. Although he says that he had no advance knowledge of the detail, which he found about only last week, Fitzpatrick writes on his blog:

"This is pretty cool because:
-- They're ridiculously excited about LiveJournal, and have been for awhile (they previous purchased advertising rights in Russia, but ended up doing a bunch of Russia-specific LJ development as well)
-- They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal in terms of product development and engineers.
-- "LiveJournal.com, Inc." now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ."

He adds: "Sounds like I'll have more LJ influence (via new role as advisory board member) than I've had recently."