Private messaging on LiveJournal

[pne]

So the recent news post says that one of their plans for 2007 is to make it possible for you to connect with others through private messaging (about time, huh?).

I'm confused by the "about time, huh?" parenthetical remark. I remember when some feature was suggested (I think it was a kind of screened comment that's visible to the person you commented to and not just to the owner of the journal), which was nixed by brad by saying it'd be used to hold private conversations, and that this was not what LiveJournal was for -- emails were better for that.

"about time" sounds as if people wanted to implement private messaging for ages but never got around to it, or lacked the technical skills, or whatever, whereas I thought I remembered that the there was active opposition from TPTB.

I suppose it comes with brad no longer being the only TPTB at LiveJournal/SixApart. Times change.

Comments

[brad.livejournal.com]

I was always against it, but my views have changed. Too many people hide their emails lately because email still sucks and they associate email with spam. So communicating via email isn't really an option much of the time.

And every other website is doing private messaging, but doing it in a totally closed way (come see our ads!). I want to do combine private messaging with open standards so you can pick up your private messages with POP3, for instance (along with the rest of your "notification inbox"). Or have us relay the email to you.