LiveJournal Dying

LiveJournal today announced a "restructuring" in their US (San Francisco) office.  All product and engineering team members are gone, top to bottom.  Only technical operations (keep those servers humming, boys!), legal, admin and customer service teams are staying... as of now. 

SUP, the Russian internet startup that bought LiveJournal in 2007 for $30 Million, will probably start consolidating all tasks in Russia.  LiveJournal is quite popular, but just like all other social networks (except MySpace), has failed to figure out how to make money.

LiveJournal is just the latest social network to start going under.  Some others I've covered (a sample of the pain in social networks) are:

• Hi5,  which represents the second tier of social networks after Facebook and Myspace
• LinkedIn, representing the business social networks
• Sneakerplay, representing the ultra-niche networks
• Ning, representing the overly funded network enablers
• Zivity, representing the adult social networks  (yep, it really is a downturn)
• And, of course, Facebook's theoretical value falling (theoretically) from $15 Billion to $1.5 Billion. 

Quite painful, unfortunately. 

Voicing Despair - Jaxtr Lays Off 13

Menlo Park based Jaxtr, which offers voice-over IP services (and yes, a social network as well... why not?), has laid off 13 people, about a third of their employees.

Jaxtr has raised a total of $21.5 Million, about half of that this June.  As such, they seem to be in a good position, as long as they keep costs contained for a while.   I like Jaxtr, I think they have a great product, and am pulling for them to come out strong on the other side.