Mirroring her majesty’s statement, “OMG!”
When I started blogging, I used LiveJournal. I never liked how their tools for integration, so simply used their win32 client to post. I’ve attempted 3 times to write a client for LJ; my 3rd is currently in Flex & in Central using it’s XMLRPC API. I surely hope they keep that. I’m excited about the technical possibilities, and increase of exposure for both professional & personal bloggers, but mainly developers. It’ll be interesting how some of LiveJournals tried and true server solutions mesh with SixApart’s MoveableType mainly.
I will say, though, that I disagree with the attitude they are portraying of the developer community of LiveJournal. I know her majesty’s experiences when helping redesign their site was wrought with great pressures of responsibility, and tons of political & PR bs. The LJ Team from that angle, appeared from my view, supportive… the community I guess just cared so much so that they lashed out at any weird change they didn’t feel comfortable with. My experiences with client development have been negative, cold, and extremely hard to “dive into”, unlike Flash where they run up to hug you. My guess is, they’ve had soo many questions on forums & email that the redundancy of saying RTFM has mentally scared them. Maybe it was my approach, who knows.
At any rate, very interesting news indeed.