Case Study - 4

Since 1999, LiveJournal has thrived as a platform for histrionic people to complain about their lives. Yes, I admit, I’ve had a LiveJournal account since 2002 and was once extremely whiny. No, you cannot have the address.

Back in their early days, LiveJournal gained significant popularity due to their use of an “invitation only” platform. Users who had an account were given a finite number of codes to pass on to friends. Because an account could only be created through the use of a code, it limited the amount of people who could sign up for the service. I seem to recall people selling their codes for relatively large amounts of cash. While many curse the use of this system, it cannot be denied that it generates significant buzz around a site— when supply is much lower than demand, demand freaks. Gmail once utilized this invitation system at the introduction of its email system and found similar results.

During its ten-year evolution, LiveJournal has toyed with several pricing strategies. As mentioned earlier, it started out as a free, invitation only service. As popularity grew, it introduced the paid account for people who didn’t want to wait for an invitation. Back in “the day,” I think it cost about $2 a month or $10 a year to purchase a paid account. Due to large success with their paid accounts, LiveJournal did away with the invitation system and implemented a free account and a fixed, paid account. Users who chose to pay the extra money for their account were rewarded with extra features, such as more user icon space (I think you got to store and use maybe 10 more icons), a personalized URL, and more customization options for your page, to make it more “you.”

That opt-in or opt-out, free and fixed strategy served LiveJournal very well for a number of years. While the introduction of many other blogging sites, the one I’m using, included, may to the outsider seem like competition was really never the case. LiveJournal’s strength beyond all other blogging tools is its focus on community. The real draw of the site is the thousands of different communities one can join and share posting access with. One of the most popular celebrity gossip websites on the internet, blog or not, is LiveJournal’s OH NO THEY DIDN’T! This gossip community, with over 50,000 members, has sometimes out-scooped the “legit” journalists and has gained press coverage in newspapers and magazines. This focus on communities, from groups devoted solely to photographic documentation of food just cooked to groups that exclusively make fun of the stupid things people say on LiveJournal (as well as the rest of the internet), is what sets it apart from every other blog website and makes competition a non-threat.

Since 2005, LiveJournal has been changing hands from owner to owner (first Six Apart and now the Russian internet company “SUP”). Currently, LiveJournal has several types of accounts, each with a different pricing strategy and set of features.

• Basic: This is the free account that was available before the infamous switch when LiveJournal decided to display banner ads for revenue. Only available to people who created accounts before a specific date (sometime in 2007). Free and Ad-free, it comes with space for six user icons and limited features. It’s just perfect for me.

• Early Adopter: These accounts are not available to the public. If you had one of the first however many accounts at the inception of LiveJournal, your account automatically became an EA. It’s free, ad-free and comes with some special benefits that I’m currently unsure of.

• Plus: All accounts created after that mythical date-line become plus accounts automatically. These are the bottom of the line of the “new” accounts and are plastered with banner ads. They bug me. I’m so thankful I have a basic account. While the come with space for 15 user icons and a bunch of other features, the ads are such a deterrent for me. Basic accounts can be converted into plus accounts, if desired for the extra features, but plus can never become basic. Basic is the kickin’ old-school account.

• Paid: No ads, 30 user icons, and a million other features. They start at $3 for one month and go up to $19.95 for a year.

• Permanent: I think they have the same features as paid accounts, but are only available at certain times (random sales!) and cost somewhere in the range of $200. If you are sure you always want a paid account, this is a good way to go. Except, you’re banking on the website always existing and you always having an interest in blogging.

Besides buying the general accounts, you can pay more money for special features like a rename token (somewhere in the range of $10) if you want to change the name of your account. You can also buy the storage space for more user icons.

LiveJournal is extremely effective at what it does and the market share it has. Because of strong emphasis on community that no other blogging site has, it holds (and hopefully will always hold) a place in the market that no one will ever be able to steal away. Their website traffic stats show that the site is still extremely popular and the marketing possibilities are endless.

• 8MM Monthly Unique Visitors
• 363MM Monthly Page Views
• Over 10 Page Views per Visit
• 45+ Page Views per Visitor per Month

The combination of pricing strategies that LiveJournal employs (plus v. paid v. the “a la carte” options), allow it to be extremely effective and a stronghold in the market. LJ for LYFE – YO!

Ethical and Legal Issues

Ah, “sexting” . . . the new frontier for hormonal teenagers with the need to be risky and who do not understand that privacy does not exist in your cell phone. I need to state for the record, that I think “kids nowadays” are nuts. Absolutely insane. This past August, I heard in the news that two cheerleaders from a high school near me, that I even took classes at, had been suspended from their squad due to the creepy actions of others. These girls, while not completely innocent, did not deserve the punishment they received.

Okay, so the story goes like this: two cheerleaders took naked photos of themselves on their cell phones and, without the girls’ consent, they accidentally made their way through the majority of the high school, via the hand-dandy feature of text forwarding.

According to an article;

“One of the photos was taken three years ago, according to court documents. Showing the girl topless, it was sent to her then-boyfriend's phone in the summer of 2005. Later that summer, the picture accidentally was distributed to other Bothell High students, according to her lawsuit.

The other teen's photo was taken in June, when she and a fellow cheerleader used their cell phones to each snap photos of themselves naked, according to her lawsuit. Those photos were later accidentally sent to other Bothell High students, though King said it was unclear how that happened.”
Somehow, administration is sent the pictures and the girls are suspended from the squad as a result. Students are told to delete the pictures if they receive them, yadda yadda yadda. Anyway, the student’s parents are outraged that their girls were punished and NO ONE ELSE WAS! The parents sued the school district for unnecessarily sharing the photos with other staff members and for a failure to properly report the material as child porn.

Let me repeat this for you, maybe you’ll be as annoyed as I am:

Two girls were suspended from their private photos being sent around the school, without their consent. Adults, teachers, professionals who knew the material to be wrong legally and morally, passed it on to other staff members!

That’s right boys and girls; the staff possessed and distributed child pornography.
Now, the question is, “how is this in any way, shape, or form, the girls’ faults?” I will agree that taking the photos in the first place was perhaps in bad taste, and totally stupid, but these are kids we’re talking about – they will be stupid sometimes. However, the action taken on part of the school district, via the school employees, was totally reprehensible and they should face child pornography charges. The crime of possession of child porn does not require intent – you are guilty if you possess it.

Although their butt’s being sued, the school district still claims it dealt with the matter correctly. They name the action as "a frivolous lawsuit over a matter which would have died down and disappeared."

Uh, sorry guys. Something like that will stick with a girl and cause her years of distrust in both men and authority, in general. This case is scheduled to be heard in U.S. District Court in March of 210, but the judge has ordered that the two sides try mediation as an alternative.

This brings up the whole notion that the presumption of privacy within technology is false hope. As these girls learned, you are kinda screwed if someone wants to distribute your private material on cell phones or whathaveyou. Maybe a better idea would be to just not take the nudie pictures on your cell.

Mass Customization

In the age of mass customization, why should clothing be any different? If clothing is supposed to be an extension of who we are, how can it accurately portray who we are if it is the same thing everyone else is wearing? Customization allows us to take the roll of designer when it comes to our apparel and maybe then, what you see is really what you get.

Two athletic clothing companies have created interactive websites based on the personal design principal, Nike and Puma. With their websites NikeID and Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ, respectively, visitors are able to design their ideal shoe. Assuming they have the roughly $100 to pay for their customization, your new shoedentity is a mere four to six weeks away.

NikeID is the long-standing shoe design leader in this field, having been around since the inception of the concept by one of their own. Once logged onto the site, a user is prompted to select a gender and then either a specific shoe they want to customize or a genre from which to pick their ideal shoe. After a series of user-friendly steps, selecting materials and colors, the consumer is left with a 3-D model of their new footwear. Although not everything can be left up to your imagination, strict colors to pick from for example, almost anything is possible within the finite choices given by Nike. The less creative may even choose to select a pre-made “custom” shoe in colors unlikely to be found at a local Footlocker. (see the Chelsea model above)

While not rocket science, it can be a little tricky to navigate around the NikeID page. Instead of being able to click a clearly-market button on the homepage that would allow the user to create a new shoe from scratch, users must sift around the site in order to find the page they are looking for. This most often means clicking on a pre-made shoe in the correct style and then selecting to “start from scratch,” so to speak. While the technology utilized in the website is crisp and purposeful, some pages take much longer to load than others, the inconsistency quite apparent. Nothing design-wise seems out of the ordinary for Nike, although some colors are bright and wild, nothing is really “out there.” Typical Nike shoes, a little cooler looking than average, for more money and a longer ship time. Not bad, but not awesome, either.

Joining the shoe customization bandwagon is Puma with their Mongolian Shoe BBQ website. The website definitely pays homage to the NikeID model, but is easier to use, more straight-forward, and has better customization possibilities. Mongolian Shoe BBQ is much more of a gimmicky website than NikeID, a little racist, but also a little fun. MSBBQ is a character website, mimicking the style of a Mongolian BBQ restaurant where you have total customization options over your meal. MSBBQ utilizes a flash-based website that is much faster and clearer than NikeID. The shoe customization options are much more fun, as well. (see the Chelsea model, also known as "the Pimp of Shoes" above)

On NikeID, the user only has a few choices between colors and textures, such as leather or synthetic material. However, on MSBBQ, the possibilities are much more fun and wacky. Puma offers everything from colored leathers, to sparkly gold material, and everything in between. While NikeID could be seen as the respectable cousin of MSBBQ, MSBBQ is definitely the fun one in the family – maybe drunk half the time and maybe a pimp under the cloak of night, you do not really care. All you need to know is that MSBBQ is where the fun is.