Saturday, May 16, 2009
Remembering LiveJournal
Pradeep Gowda wrote to me on Twitter:
I was reading through your old journal entries circa 2000. Looks like you were a tweeter even back then .. ;)
Here’s a screenshot of my desktop from April 2000 (click for full size):
See that text box with a submit button? That was LoserJabber (since renamed LogJam), the LiveJournal client for Linux. It was designed to sit in a corner of your screen so you could type into it every once in a while to describe what you were doing. That’s how everyone posted back then.
LiveJournal was the Twitter of ten years ago! Seriously, the number of things that came out of LiveJournal – the activity-oriented social graph, event sync, memcached, OpenID, threaded commenting, userpics – make it worthy of far more respect than it gets these days.
(Aside: yes, that’s GNOME 1.0 in that screenshot, and yes, it had brushed metal long before Mac OS X.)