Do users love LiveJournal in spite of its antique qualities or because of them?
LiveJournal’s upcoming Scrapbook update has us leaning toward the latter.
Scrapbook is a photo-hosting feature exclusive to LiveJournal Plus, Paid, and Permanent accounts. When the feature was launched in 2004, it was comparable to another 2004 image gallery launch—Flickr. However, as Flickr has continued to modernize, Scrapbook has remained frozen in time.
LiveJournal has made few changes to Scrapbook since its launch, but the wear and tear is starting to show. For example, users are unable to upload more than one photo at a time.
On the LiveJournal news blog, the staff announced a full revamp of Scrapbook slated for early May.
“The current implementation of Scrapbook is outdated and has a number of problems, including simple usability issues such as not being able to upload multiple images at once,” it wrote. “We want to address these issues by implementing a new photo hosting service that is easier to use, has more intuitive navigation features, and provide a platform that can more easily be built & improve upon in the future.”
For people familiar with Internet capabilities outside of LiveJournal, this update looks like anything but. For example, the new Scrapbook will not support video uploads of any size. And, most importantly to current Scrapbookers, it will no longer allow users to organize their images and galleries with tags.
Though LiveJournal users are ordinarily resistant to the staff’s attempts to modernize the network, some now wish they’d done more to bring today’s technology to the feature.
“How, in the year 2012 was it not considered when programming a content management system to not include the ability to use tags?” wrote yayhappens. “The improvements listed here are not even competitive to Flickr, Picasa, PhotoBucket and the other myriad of things out there that would require payment for extra service and features … so like … why bother?”
“Like many others, I am astounded that you are eliminating the tagging feature. Not only are you erasing many hours of work for a great many users, but as someone else pointed out earlier, “this is 2012; an image hosting service without tagging is inexcusable,” wrote evelynne. “I hope you seriously reconsider this migration or at least allow users the option of remaining with the old ScrapBook and its tagging system.
The Scrapbook updates are yet another system of the 14-year-old network’s growing pains, as it struggles to retain its core userbase while transitioning into the modern era. At least today’s user complaints show that LiveJournalers are finally ready to get on board.
Photo by LiveJournal