SixApart
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| Name: | SixApart (aka 6A) |
| Date(s): | 2001 - present |
| Profit/Nonprofit: | For profit |
| Country based in: | United States based |
| Focus: | Blogging and social networking |
| External Links: | wayback copy of sixapart's website wikipedia page |
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From 2005 to 2007, SixApart and Brad Fitzpatrick owned LiveJournal.
A vice-president was Anil Dash. [1]
Regarding a server name:
Six Apart nicknamed their servers (IIRC) "Melody", after Brad Fitzpatrick's favorite album, L'Histoire de Melody Nelson by the French art rock singer Serge Gainsbourg.
L'Histoire de Melody Nelson is a concept album about Serge Gainsbourg's forbidden feelings for a teenage girl, and Gainsbourg would later record a duet called "Lemon Incest" with his underage daughter. [2]
Strikethrough and Boldthrough
Brad Fitzpatrick left SixApart after Strikethrough. [3]
Selling LiveJournal to the Russians
Honestly, i think by this time 6A was pretty tired of LJ. There had been so much drama on 6A's watch, and they weren't getting the return on value they thought they'd get when they purchased this community (you saw this a lot in the early 00s when "online community" became a buzz term, and you still see it today where companies snap up other companies with communities to try and basically just monetize them... only to fail and get frustrated because these users are so passionate and don't want to be used in this fashion). So my guess is since they already had the licensing agreement with SUP, they just said "hey, you want the lot of this?" LJ was wildly popular in Russia at the time, the Russian name for LJ literally means "blogging."
Other fun facts about SUP's involvement:
When the licensing deal was first announced, it was stated that all accounts that post in some type of Cyrillic language would be managed by SUP. This freaked out a bunch of Russian users who stated they use LJ because it had no involvement with any Russian contacts. They felt free and safe to express themselves. 6A and SUP allowed users to opt-out of SUP management of their accounts... only for 6A to turn around and sell the entire enterprise to SUP a year later.
Shortly after SUP completed their purchase, they announced an "Advisory Board." This would be a group of academics in online spaces (chief among them dana boyd who was an avid LJ user), Brad himself, and two members elected from the LJ userbase. This board would meet to discuss LJ feature ideas, concerns from the community, etc. The two user seats though were interesting. One would represent all Cyrillic languages. One would represent literally everyone else. Cyrillic languages at the time made up 20% of LJ, which made that division... feel a little uneven. Then the election happened, allegations of ballot stuffing were all over, the non-Cyrillic representative basically went MIA and never responded to anyone, the board met only a few times and then disbanded.
Also, the move of servers to Russia was done literally in the dead of night and with no announcement or fanfare. One day, someone just noticed that the servers suddenly pointed at Russian IPs and that was that. [4]
References
- ^ Anil Dash, Archived version
- ^ from a comment at Strikethrough, Boldthrough, Nipplegate, and Russian Censorship: The LiveJournal Saga (2001)
- ^ brad's life - On Leaving SixApart, Archived version, August 6, 2007 ("Since I've always been just kinda been a floater engineer at SixApart, never really part of (or head of) a group, I just feel a bit detached now without something obviously broken consuming all of my time & attention. There are plenty of other groups at SixApart having fun working on other problems, so I could join one of those groups, but I think this is just a good point in my life to change directions a bit. My apologies that there's not more drama to this whole story. :)")
- ^ from kethryvis at Strikethrough, Boldthrough, Nipplegate, and Russian Censorship: The LiveJournal Saga (2019)