It's interesting how fleeting software fame is. Perhaps that's just a special case of how fleeting fame is.

Folks who came of age in the early 2000s certainly remember him - he founded LiveJournal; wrote memcached, MogileFS, Gearman, and a bunch of other prominent software packages; authored the first version of the OpenID spec (which eventually became OAuth, which you see all over the web); and was one of the early Go engineers. He's featured in Coders at Work.

Same with other tech luminaries from that time period: Jamie Zawinski (xemacs, Netscape), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek, StackOverflow, Trello), Paul Buchheit (GMail, Friendfeed), Kent Beck (Extreme Programming), Ward Cunningham (XP, WikiWikiWeb), et al. Don't hear about them much these days, and when one of Kent Beck's more recent posts was featured on Hacker News people were like "Who is this guy?"

That's true; some of those folks just left the software industry, though, I think, or are at or approaching retirement age.

Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had comparatively immense control over who could read and reply to posts.

This isn't to say that Twitter and Facebook don't get a lot of things right, too, in terms of ease of posting, lack of friction, and (for both better and worse) monetization, but I wish "granularity of acces control" had been a lesson we'd carried forward.

In any case, I'll be curious to see where Brad ends up next.

> This isn't to say that Twitter and Facebook don't get a lot of things right, too, in terms of ease of posting, lack of friction, and (for both better and worse) monetization, but I wish "granularity of acces control" had been a lesson we'd carried forward.

Facebook had incredible granularity with regard to who could view one's posts — then they nerfed it by letting the people who are on your "lists" view who else is on them. (I'm private enough to not want people to know that they're on my Close Friends list with 30 other people.)

There was a way to get around this nerf by including a "smart list" in your set, but Facebook recently removed "smart lists" altogether.

My Facebook post privacy settings are a mess now, and I also gave up and stopped posting anything personal.

(I wanted to add that I used LiveJournal a lot in the early 2000's, and their friend list feature was amazing.)

I was never an enthusiastic Facebook user and didn't really get into lists there, so I'd forgotten about that feature. But it does seem Facebook's philosophy has moved ever closer to "just post and let The Algorithm™ figure out who to show it to."

When Google+ was under development in 2011, I remarked to my team "So, our differentiator from Facebook is...basically everything that LiveJournal had in 2002?"

Circles were great! Google+ was among the least obnoxious social media platforms I have experienced.

I think it could really have replaced all the fragmented around Google comment forms, but it sure wasn't wise to force everyone on YouTube on it in such a shitty way. I think that initial public outcry was a significant stop to its velocity, yet it could have become moderately successful and very valuable long-term to slowly integrate all of Google's services. Just so many parts of the execution were questionable, including the mobile apps :\

Was the lack of a semi-immediate huge return the reason it was killed?

Heh. While I never really got into Google+, its "circles" idea definitely reminded me of LJ -- and it seemed like a great idea. It seems like it might not have been communicated very well to the audience.

At least one part of it is the faith that users can be smart people, rather than the current approach to customization UX which seems to be "take it all away from the fools".

I think part of that comes from the (reasonable) assumption that the simpler you make your UX, the less friction there is for people using your service. But it would be nice to see someone work on bringing more granularity and flexibility back to social media, even at the cost of a little more friction.

(I also suspect some of it comes from people looking at Apple's historic "make simple things simple" approach to UX and taking the wrong lessons from it, which arguably includes latter-day Apple, but that's a whole different post...)

> Don't hear about them much these days

I hear about Brad every single day because I follow him on Twitter. It's just a question about where you consume your information from.

I think it's more that the volume of information has massively expanded since. In the days before MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, LiveJournal was the social network (along with blogs and personal websites), so naturally its founder and people who were active on it had higher profiles.

I’ve been running a website for over 10 years and have, at various points, made use of all those packages (mogileFS, memcache, gearman). Brad’s influence is enormous.

Thank you, Brad.

Justin Frankel is another name that could go on that list.

You will not hear about Zawinski much here, because his blog has an... interesting... redirect when it sees a ycombinator referrer url.

I know all of those names, except Brad Fitz. This is like a WTF moment for me.

Like first hearing about Gaiman's Sandman 15 years after it came out and thinking it would have been right up my alley 15 years ago.

There was one more person I remember. Jim Kent. He worked on the human genome project. President Bill Clinton compared that to man landing on the moon.

Brad here.

I wrote about this when I first joined Google, having noticed the same prior to joining:

https://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html

That was my big fear of joining Google, being sucked into the black hole.

(Ignore the later part of the post about the App Engine app that I couldn't keep running because App Engine kept breaking me all the time.)

I mean, that Smoke Detector thing was pretty notable… although to be fair, I was inside Google at the time :-)

Interesting reading this now, the part about making open source contributions easier makes a pretty good pitch for Github.

I'm really curious though where you end up now :)

Well, I disagree. His presence has been huge in social media and in a variety of Go-specific communities. Google has had a great impact in that because it was basically sponsoring the whole thing.

He came into my consciousness after I read Coders at Work. Fascinating book.

Great individuals should really reconsider joining Google. I saw this so many times, you get lured by the money and the big name and after a couple years what you do is associated with Google only.

I'm wondering if they will be able to sustain this now that the Google brand-name is not specifically being seen as a good thing anymore.

Google manages to turn even the most brilliant men and women into purse dogs. It's kind of their thing. There have been almost two decades of blog posts on this exact phenomenon, and I never get bored of reading them.