Six Apart to buy LiveJournal?
Om Malik has an exclusive post reporting that Six Apart is close to buying LiveJournal! Very big news there, which, if true, will make my new years guess of Six Apart going public more likely. Remember that as of Alexa, TypePad is not at place 765 world wide, while Blogs.com (also TypePad) is at place 2814 and LiveJournal is at place 565! Some of the big sites out there seem to be moving together there.
As they would also get the people behind LiveJournal they would get some hell of a knowledge of keeping a big service scaling, some amazing open source applications and a good infrastructur. Just check out danga.com and check the presentation from Brad (founder of LiveJournal) at Oscon 2004 which gives a bit of detail on the LiveJournal Infrastructure, Memcached, tweaking MySQL, BigIP, lots of big hardware.
As most of LiveJournal’s users are using the service for free, Six Apart’s deal with Kanoodle might allow them to monetize all that, if the LiveJournal users allow that. I would also be back where I started, because as I posted beginning 2004, I started on LiveJournal beginning of 2001!
It would be an interesting match and I wish the best of luck to both teams to reach a good conclusion and get what they want out of it!
Update : Rumors are true.