January Status Report

We now host over 2,000,000 users, roughly half of which are active in some way. It's only been 9 months since we hit 1,000,000, so it's nice to know so many people have chosen LiveJournal to host their journals!

We've just hired marksmith as a developer, deveiant will be rolling into town in the next few days, and whitaker and I will soon follow. We will have more developers than ever available at the office, which is one of our big goals for 2004.

We haven't received the final versions of our last two commercials yet, as they keep being revised and re-edited. We'll make those available to download as soon as the production company is finished with them.

To finish addressing all of the questions & concerns for this year's State of the Goat, I've compiled all of our answers on this page. If you had a question you don't see on that page, feel free to leave me a comment or an email and I'll update it in the next round of answers.

The big development project for the past month was enhanced security for the entire site, using SSL and challenge/response authentication. Most of the issues that arose from the additional security have been ironed out, but as always feel free to report bugs to our support department. Also, xevinx finished his new S2 style called Opal, which is currently available to paid users. You can see it in action on Kevin's journal, and can select it from the Customize Journal page after you select "New System (S2)" as your style system.

One of our big goals for February is to split up the overloaded concept of "friends", turning it into separate categories relating to who you read on your friends page, who you trust to read your entries, who you know in real life, etc. This will allow us to cluster this information and put it into memcache, so we'll be freeing up system resources along the way. mahlon's working on merging our photo hosting site with our paid account service, and posting by camera phone will shortly follow. lisa, nbarkas, and bradfitz will be working on upgrading our database servers, making sure each cluster runs faster and smoother.

Update: We are now selling a limited amount of hooded sweatshirts and baseball caps in the LiveJournal store.

Hope you all have a good February!