![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Well, I've spent some time over at Dreamwidth now, and I have to say I'm continually impressed.
It's in closed beta testing right now. So there's a lot they don't have up and running. But there's so much that is. And the speed at which more stuff is happening is impressive. Meanwhile, people are getting to know each other and everyone is happy and excited and it's all so bright and new and shiny.
It feels cool. It feels historic. Watching this thing coming together. Being a part of that.
But it's more than that. It's... everything you wished was better about LJ? Odds are, they want it, too. And they're making it happen.
And... it's in closed beta. They're testing things out, looking for bugs, controlling site growth... and they have a full OpenID interface. LJ created OpenID. It's a way to log in to one site using an account from another. You log into, say, your LJ account. Then you go to a site that accepts OpenID. When it asks you to log in, you give it your journal address. LJ verifies with you that you want to use your OpenID, and then verifies you to the other site. So you can do stuff there without signing up for a whole account.
Of the sites that let you use OpenID (MySpace and Facebook not among them), most allow only minimal function. Over at, say, Blogger.com, you can use your OpenID to post comments... and that's about it.
At Dreamwidth, an OpenID user can do just about anything a basic account holder can, short of posting new entries. You get a profile page with bio and interests and everything. You can adjust pretty much all your site and account settings. You get 6 userpics. You can send and receive private messages. You can friend people. People can friend you...
Oh, I should mention... Dreamwidth split "friends" into two seperate lists. There are "subscriptions" - journals and comms you want on your "reading page" - and there's your "circle" - the journals who have access to your f-locked posts. (Amusingly, they call this the "Watching, Trusting, Friending" system... or "WTF" for short.)
Back to OpenID, though... it's closed beta. Not everything works. They're running around trying to make things work. They're worried about how fast they can expand before stuff breaks or resources (server processing, bandwidth, etc) get overtaxed. And they've given just about full access to OpenID accounts. Any LJ user can go over there right now and be a part of things. Do everything short of posting full entries. It amazes me.
And it's not just that. It's the loving, geeky care the People In Charge have for all this. I mean, check out this news post. It's the latest weekly progress report. One of the site's co-owners taking the time to let everyone know what's up... and barely managing to hold to a proper professional tone without bursting with squee. Take a look at this, where she's talking about the weekly bugs identified and/or fixed report:
It's a freaking bug report list, and she's bouncing up and down over the awesomeness.
And you know what? It is pretty awesome. Nearly a hundred bugs fixed and/or improvements made, largely by a volunteer development team (though the site owners do still claim about 1/4 of those fixes). That's impressive. (And I should highlight the fact that the "bugs" include improvements - not just things that aren't working right, but "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?" postings.)
It's a management staff that cares. That responds. That is working, not just to make everything work, but to make it awesome.
Dreamwidth has the main site and the mailing lists and a development wiki (which, BTW, includes feature wishlists) and an IRC channel/server (irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw) and a Twitter feed and a Bugzilla thingy and... Let me put it this way - they're open to input. And they actually listen. And then respond. And, often, if it's called for, do something about it (if not, it's because they're scrambling around trying to get everything off the ground and working).
And there's the whole attitude. Of openness, of positivity, of... well, you know how LJ has a few of its own HTML tags? Like, say, [lj user]? Dreamwidth supports that. You can use lj-cut and lj user and all that. Just so you don't run into trouble from force of habit. But they also opened it up. Well, in two ways. First off, you can do [lj user=pgwfolc site=livejournal.com] and create a link from Dreamwidth to my LJ journal. Which is awesome. But the main command for that doesn't include the letters "LJ." It's just [user name=pgwfolc site=livejournal.com]. Do it without the "site=" and you get a local DW link. And, for the record, there's no "dw user=" tag. The main tag is just plain "user" (just as the cut tag is [cut text=] ) ... because they want it to work - simply, easily, and all-inclusively. A cross-site welcome. It's part of the general philosophy.
It's... "Let's not trash LJ. Sure, most of us are ex-LJ people. The development team consists largely of people who used to work for LJ. But why trash them? Let's learn from their mistakes. Let's do it the way it should be done. The way we've always wished it were done. And let's do it for everyone. No matter where they come from. Let's build something new and open and beautiful and exciting."
Really... it makes me think this is what LJ must have been like, back in the day. Back when it was just starting. Except that now it's being done by people with experience at the job and a practical eye towards sustainable business (which does not include ads... except, maybe, a classified ads section... a special area you can choose to visit, where you can pay a small fee to put up an ad/announcement/request/offer/whatever).
Oh, and did I mention the Cool Hunters? It's a community dedicated to finding nifty things people are doing (or want to be doing) with the service so that the developers can help make it easier to do nifty things.
And with all that said, there's still more that's awesome. And more yet that you may find awesome but which doesn't excite me quite as much.
But... think about it. No ads. A management team that cares. About big improvements. About little tweaks. About bringing in people from other sites, even if only to bolster the existing community (without getting any additional direct funding from doing so). About... about doing whatever it takes to make the site as great as it can be. It's all of that and more.
But, as LeVar Burton used to say... "You don't have to take my word for it." If you're reading this, odds are you've got an account that works with OpenID (LiveJournal, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Blogger, Flickr, WordPress... there's no shortage of options). Go take a look for yourself.
It's in closed beta testing right now. So there's a lot they don't have up and running. But there's so much that is. And the speed at which more stuff is happening is impressive. Meanwhile, people are getting to know each other and everyone is happy and excited and it's all so bright and new and shiny.
It feels cool. It feels historic. Watching this thing coming together. Being a part of that.
But it's more than that. It's... everything you wished was better about LJ? Odds are, they want it, too. And they're making it happen.
And... it's in closed beta. They're testing things out, looking for bugs, controlling site growth... and they have a full OpenID interface. LJ created OpenID. It's a way to log in to one site using an account from another. You log into, say, your LJ account. Then you go to a site that accepts OpenID. When it asks you to log in, you give it your journal address. LJ verifies with you that you want to use your OpenID, and then verifies you to the other site. So you can do stuff there without signing up for a whole account.
Of the sites that let you use OpenID (MySpace and Facebook not among them), most allow only minimal function. Over at, say, Blogger.com, you can use your OpenID to post comments... and that's about it.
At Dreamwidth, an OpenID user can do just about anything a basic account holder can, short of posting new entries. You get a profile page with bio and interests and everything. You can adjust pretty much all your site and account settings. You get 6 userpics. You can send and receive private messages. You can friend people. People can friend you...
Oh, I should mention... Dreamwidth split "friends" into two seperate lists. There are "subscriptions" - journals and comms you want on your "reading page" - and there's your "circle" - the journals who have access to your f-locked posts. (Amusingly, they call this the "Watching, Trusting, Friending" system... or "WTF" for short.)
Back to OpenID, though... it's closed beta. Not everything works. They're running around trying to make things work. They're worried about how fast they can expand before stuff breaks or resources (server processing, bandwidth, etc) get overtaxed. And they've given just about full access to OpenID accounts. Any LJ user can go over there right now and be a part of things. Do everything short of posting full entries. It amazes me.
And it's not just that. It's the loving, geeky care the People In Charge have for all this. I mean, check out this news post. It's the latest weekly progress report. One of the site's co-owners taking the time to let everyone know what's up... and barely managing to hold to a proper professional tone without bursting with squee. Take a look at this, where she's talking about the weekly bugs identified and/or fixed report:
This post -- it's long, but I think it's really fascinating -- details every bug we resolved this week, along with a brief description, hopefully understandable by the non-technically-inclined, as to what it does and why we thought it was important. It was a very diverse week. From small improvements (OMG you can preview a comment directly from the inline comment form now, thanks to allen) to big projects, from backend cleanup to new features (you can now add links to your Twitter and Delicious accounts from the profile, for instance -- that was totally me), it was a banner week all around. Look over the list; you'll probably find one or two things on it that will make you jump up and down and go "OMG, THAT." (My own OMG, THAT list is about half of those...)
It's a freaking bug report list, and she's bouncing up and down over the awesomeness.
And you know what? It is pretty awesome. Nearly a hundred bugs fixed and/or improvements made, largely by a volunteer development team (though the site owners do still claim about 1/4 of those fixes). That's impressive. (And I should highlight the fact that the "bugs" include improvements - not just things that aren't working right, but "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?" postings.)
It's a management staff that cares. That responds. That is working, not just to make everything work, but to make it awesome.
Dreamwidth has the main site and the mailing lists and a development wiki (which, BTW, includes feature wishlists) and an IRC channel/server (irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw) and a Twitter feed and a Bugzilla thingy and... Let me put it this way - they're open to input. And they actually listen. And then respond. And, often, if it's called for, do something about it (if not, it's because they're scrambling around trying to get everything off the ground and working).
And there's the whole attitude. Of openness, of positivity, of... well, you know how LJ has a few of its own HTML tags? Like, say, [lj user]? Dreamwidth supports that. You can use lj-cut and lj user and all that. Just so you don't run into trouble from force of habit. But they also opened it up. Well, in two ways. First off, you can do [lj user=pgwfolc site=livejournal.com] and create a link from Dreamwidth to my LJ journal. Which is awesome. But the main command for that doesn't include the letters "LJ." It's just [user name=pgwfolc site=livejournal.com]. Do it without the "site=" and you get a local DW link. And, for the record, there's no "dw user=" tag. The main tag is just plain "user" (just as the cut tag is [cut text=] ) ... because they want it to work - simply, easily, and all-inclusively. A cross-site welcome. It's part of the general philosophy.
It's... "Let's not trash LJ. Sure, most of us are ex-LJ people. The development team consists largely of people who used to work for LJ. But why trash them? Let's learn from their mistakes. Let's do it the way it should be done. The way we've always wished it were done. And let's do it for everyone. No matter where they come from. Let's build something new and open and beautiful and exciting."
Really... it makes me think this is what LJ must have been like, back in the day. Back when it was just starting. Except that now it's being done by people with experience at the job and a practical eye towards sustainable business (which does not include ads... except, maybe, a classified ads section... a special area you can choose to visit, where you can pay a small fee to put up an ad/announcement/request/offer/whatever).
Oh, and did I mention the Cool Hunters? It's a community dedicated to finding nifty things people are doing (or want to be doing) with the service so that the developers can help make it easier to do nifty things.
And with all that said, there's still more that's awesome. And more yet that you may find awesome but which doesn't excite me quite as much.
But... think about it. No ads. A management team that cares. About big improvements. About little tweaks. About bringing in people from other sites, even if only to bolster the existing community (without getting any additional direct funding from doing so). About... about doing whatever it takes to make the site as great as it can be. It's all of that and more.
But, as LeVar Burton used to say... "You don't have to take my word for it." If you're reading this, odds are you've got an account that works with OpenID (LiveJournal, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Blogger, Flickr, WordPress... there's no shortage of options). Go take a look for yourself.
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As for happiness... Yes. That. Exactly. I wrote up a whole post about (non-mystical) karma in my other, more private journal. But yes, it boils down to exactly that.
And yes, that's how I see DW, too. Which is why it's so exciting to see it coming together and, in some small way, to help make it happen.
Finally... very glad to have met you, too. :)