LiveJournal News

Announcing the New LiveJournal Team
We're excited to announce that our new General Manager Matt Berardo has arrived at our San Francisco office, his experience and vision at the ready. We look forward to working with Matt on continuously improving the site, and we hope you do too!

LiveJournal, Inc.
We're also pleased to present the launch of the LiveJournal, Inc. website, a resource for information on our new management team and staff. Come learn more about who we are, where we've been and, most importantly, where we're going with LiveJournal.


At work in our San Francisco office. As you can see, we've got plenty of space to grow!

LJ Writer's Block Questions
In celebration of our new team, and to show appreciation for the history of LiveJournal so far, we're taking next week to kick off a progressive and productive future with Writer's Block questions about you, your memories, and your feelings on LiveJournal. We've all got stories--about how we found LiveJournal, who we met here, and why the site is important to us. So follow along with the Questions of the Day during June 15-21st, and take some time to read what others have written. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

Advisory Board Elections
Today, May 22nd, marks the beginning of the Advisory Board Election process. Polls will be open through the 29th. Out of the following list, find the candidate you think is best-suited to provide the kind of input we at LiveJournal can use to better the site:

vichan
twirlandswirl
tango
squeaky19
sollitaire
rm
randomposting
qfemale
primitivepeople
mrflagg
lostcosmonaut
lordandrei
lizyd
legomymalfoy
jmaynard
jj_maccrimmon
jette
jameth
imc
fuzzface00
deathboy
daniidebrabant
cambler

This is for you guys, so cast your vote! The polls are waiting at lj_election_en.

New V-Gifts
Summer's finally here! The season brings warm weather, the spirit of apprecciation, and, naturally, a slew of new v-gifts. If you're looking to celebrate a special friendship, the spirit of theatre or a loved one's graduation, we've got perfect ornaments for the occasion. Take a gander at these fine options and get your celebration on.


L to R: daisy, theatre masks, tiara, diploma, graduation cap

TxtLJ
You can use LiveJournal's TxtLJ service to receive text notifications and make posts to your journal with your mobile phone. Give us some feedback on the experience at feedback. What would make TxtLJ more useful? How can we improve the service for you guys?

LJ Dashboard
We've cooked up a new utility at LJ Labs, where we're developing a whole host of LJ side projects.

Introducing LJ Dashboard, a portal to the most popular communities, journals and entries on LiveJournal. Now there's a mechanism to help you discover new content and keep track of what's happening out there. Login to the Dashboard using your Open ID, which is exampleusername.livejournal.com. After you're asked to grant identity validation to dashboard.livejournal.com, you'll be all set to poke around and play with some of the things we've come up with.

Since we're launching LJ Dashboard for the first time, we encourage you to post some feedback at lj_labs.

We're currently running some house ads on the Dashboard. Soon ads for external businesses will replace them. But right now all users see the house ads because, for the time being, we don't have a way of distinguishing between paid and unpaid users on the Dashboard. Have no fear: soon as we've got that worked out, paid users will be spared. Thanks for your patience!

We're having a lot of fun with some great ideas right now so keep an eye out for new LJ Labs releases!

Advisory Board Elections
Do you think you would make a great addition to the LJ Advisory Board? Well now is your chance to nominate yourself! The nomination process begins May 5th and voting will take place from May 22nd - 29th. The newly-elected user-representative for the Advisory Board will begin his or her term just a few days after the votes are counted on June 1, 2008. You can find all the information you'll need about the process, as well as the exact rules and dates in lj_2008. We'll post in news again on May 5th to remind you to submit your nomination. We can't wait to see all of the amazing nominees!

Introducing LiveJournal Labs
While most of us are busy working on features and fixes for LiveJournal, we wanted to create a forum where we could showcase some of our latest ideas that are not quite ready for the prime time. Some of those ideas might never get integrated into the product, while some of them might become separate services.

The new forum is called LiveJournal Labs and can be found at http://www.livejournal.com/lab.bml. We will be adding new applications over the next few months. In the meantime, please play around and let us know what you think!

Post to Your LJ (and ALL your blogs) from Facebook
Blog It powered by TypePad is Six Apart's new cross-platform blogging application for Facebook. Blog It brings some of the best social networking aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy to blog from within Facebook. Whether you you blog using LiveJournal, Movable Type, Blogger, Tumblr, or numerous other services, now you can update everything and everyone via one easy-to-create post on Facebook.

For more information about Blog It powered by TypePad, please visit http://blogit.typepad.com/.

• The Panther Express Content Delivery Network is now serving Userpics, CSS and LJ image files. This will speed up the loading of pages, especially for our international users.
• The thread expander is now supported by "The Boxer" and "Variable Flow" layouts, as are Custom styles.
• Polls can now be closed by the poll creator, and re-opened again if need be.
• OpenID friends can now leave comments in journals that have been marked as “friends only.”
• There's a new “Delete All” button in your inbox that allows you to easily delete all of your messages.

LiveJournal Housewarming TOMORROW!
Are you going to be in the Bay Area tomorrow night? If so, please stop by the LiveJournal offices in San Francisco and help us celebrate our new office space, meet the new additions to our team, and discuss all of the exciting things we're working on for 2008 and beyond. The get-together starts at 6:00 p.m. tomorrow night. We'll have snacks and drinks, so all you need to bring is yourself!

Address: 576 Folsom Street (at 2nd Street, next to the Courtyard Marriott)

If you think you can make it, let us know in the comments, or... just show up. We can't wait to see you!