This case is more complicated and less historical than chain mail. So, I'll break down the issues into four parts: (1) Initial perceptions, (2) What is state-of-the-art, (3) Comparison, (4) Dubious design.
(1) Initial Perceptions
Two things instantly jump out. The first, is the extremely obtrusive banner ads. The kinds of flashing and flickering things that have gone out of style on larger (and possibly more reputable) ad-driven sites like Yahoo, Google, or even AOL. The second, is the strange list of words on the left that turn out to be the handles of subscribers. Unfortunately, after I tear my eyes away from the heinous banners, they next drift down to "GodSaidYourShitIsMine", "TheSexyBeastofCU", or "xxAznBBAngelxx" (what's with the xx's!!), well before I can make them focus on what is supposed to be the main content of the page. I'm sure this is the reasoning behind their choice of identifier: to grab my attention. But okay, the second thing is a detail that is not really a Xanga issue per se. The ads are still what bug me, not because I have a problem with ads, but becuase these are like, the bottom-of-the barrel borderline-scam ads. You'd have to go to a shady warez or porn sites to get any sketchier. What kinds of ads are there? There's the ever present "free iPod" ad which is basically a pyramid scheme to sell out your friends' email and demographic info. There's one that tries to sell various crappy "online universities," including the ever dubious University of Phoenix. There's one that tries to trick you into subscribing to a ringtone service by offering you free ringtones (so tricky!). But okay, this isn't the first time I've seen sites supported by "sub-premium" ads. Actually, Dave works for a company that deals in such things. The real issues emerge when you examine Xanga in context.
(2) The State of the Art
Well, I'm no master of the blogosphere. But in my opinon, the state of the art in hosted blog systems is Google's Blogger service. Before I talk "up" Blogger, a moment to talk it "down" a little and say why I felt it was not a task fit in this case. Blogger has a flexible ownership hierarchy where a user account contains a separate public identity (e.g. handle/screen name) and zero-or-more independantly named blogs. LJ and Xanga are designed solely for diaries, where one's user name is both one's public identity and blog name. Thus for someone wanting to do a diary-style blog, there is a small amount of additional setup effort associated with Blogger, whereas LJ and Xanga are dedicated exclusively to this format. Blogger is structured more towards having titled blog entries with parenthetical dates (although this can be modified). LJ and Xanga use the date to title entries in true diary format.
From a larger-scale perspective, Blogger's system is very elegant since it allows a person with a single login identity to publish multiple blogs each with different public identities. The sign-up process is very straightforward and it takes only a couple of seconds to set up. Comments can be open to the public (w/o registration), restricted to registered users, or restricted to approved members of the blog. You can choose to show or not show the profile images of registered commenters. A "magic" e-mail address is created that you can use to blog-by-email. There is a mobile blogging feature that allows you to blog from your phone using SMS. The posting interface is very clean, with a WYSIWYG editor for composing and formatting your post. There's a spell checker and a really neat image upload and layout tool. (Blogger now allows images to be posted as part of its free service.) And, no ads (this is true for LJ as well). This means not only no foreign and dubious content on a blog, but also that you have complete control over the look and feel of the entire page. This may seem minor, but imagine you have a site with a black background, but the required banner ad is surrounded in this big white box and the color scheme of the ad is whatever the ad provider wants. Without full control over the full page, you would be unable to stray far from the provider's default scheme without risking some truly jarring visual interactions.
But what really endears me to blogger, is that it "plays nice" and its documentation is very friendly and well-written. What do I mean by "plays nice" and "friendly"? Well, Blogger is primarily a text blog service that recently added the ability to add images to posts. It's not a photo-blogging service like Flickr. The documentation doesn't pretend that users don't want to do things that aren't provided within the site and takes into account that they might want multiple choices. The documentation directly addresses questions like "What are other ways to post pictures to my blog?" and then instruct you how to link Flickr to your Blogger blog. Why am I so impressed by this? Remember that Blogger is owned by Google. Flickr is owned by arch-rival Yahoo. Despite this highly competitive situation, they have decided that user experience and freedom is a priority over locking them in, and I really respect that.
There is also RSS feed information in the template for easy subscription. I use the "Live Bookmarks" features built into Firefox's bookmarking mechanism (screenshot to the left, click for a larger version) so that I can see changes and additions to people's blogs, the CJAS gallery, and news, all from my browser. If you look in the lower-right, there's an orange icon in the corner of the screen. Blogger automatically has the template configured so that icon will appear in browsers (like Firefox or Opera) that support RSS. A user can just click on that icon and add the feed as a bookmark. This way, I can scan for new content just by waving my mouse rather than visiting all those sites. There are even online services like BlogLines that will display all your feeds and their content from a single interface. There are even little desktop widgets built for Konfabulator that can track feeds. There's also an external posting mechanism that lets you standalone programs like w.bloggar (there's acutally a whole ecosystem of these things and they generally function with LJ as well) in case you find that more convenient.Tomorrow: Xanga wrap-up
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