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 Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.
“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaing brands going forward” he added.
Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.
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 The National Center For Health Statistics (NCHS) says that there are approximately 2.2 million marriages in the U.S. every year. Some of those marriages work out well. But a big percentage of marriages - up to 1.4 million per year - end in divorce.
There are sites that help people plan for marriage, like the $400+ million market cap TheKnot.com. And when the time comes, BabyCenter, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, will help them through the process of having a baby. There’s even Caring.com, which helps people plan for aging and death.
But if your blissful union ends in a dissolution, there aren’t many places to turn on the Internet for help in getting through the process. And that’s a shame, because the average participant spends up to $15,000 in the months leading up to and after a divorce. Houses are sold or refinanced, new bank and credit card accounts are opened, and someone has to furnish that shabby apartment that dad has been booted to. And it doesn’t stop there, or course. Revenge sex and, eventually, the ridiculous hope that the next relationship will end better than the previous one leads divorcees to start checking out the online dating services, too.
That’s why new Florida-based startup Divorce360 makes so much sense. These people are confused, lonely and need to make major financial decisions fast. Divorce360 will help them, just like TheKnot helps with marriages and BabyCenter helps with having a baby. And like those sites, Divorce360 will find ways make money through advertising, classified listings and lead generation.
Site Overview
 The site is broken up into time based categories, from Deciding (to have a divorce) through Moving On (at the end of the process). Each category has four sub-categories (legal, financial, emotional, children). Each page has content relevant to the category - paid contributions by journalists, blog posts by users, a Q&A section (with questions and answers provided by users) and video. The professional content is clearly there to seed the site. The user generated stuff, including user profiles, blogs and questions/answers, help builds community on the site. That community can help provide a crucial support network for the newly divorced.
A directory for service providers is coming. The company says listings will be free to ensure rich content. Later, premium listings will help generate revenue. The site also has other resources for divorcees: checklists, budget calculators, a glossary, links to relevant state laws and resources and an abuse hotline.
Here’s one of the smartest features - the site has an area for users to keep private notes that are not viewable by others - a sort of private journal and incident report. In the early stages of a breakup privacy is often a real problem since the couple cohabitate and any notes or files, even if stored on a computer hard drive, may be seen by the enemy (your wife or husband).
Advertising for now is basically a mixture of display and text ads. But over time, the company says, they’ll be able to generate revenue more intelligently by recommending services, classified ads in the directory and other lead generation.
Divorce360, which has six employees, was founded by Cotter Cuningham, who was previously the COO of publicly held BankRate.com (Cunningham says he’s never been divorced, by the way). The company is headquartered in Palm Beach, Florida. They raised a $2.5 million Series A round of funding in September 2007 from Austin Ventures and a number of angel investors. Austin Ventures’ Tom Ball joined their board of directors.
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 Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.
First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.
We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).
Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).
* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.
* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.
* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.
* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.
* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.
* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.
* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.
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 Jakob Lodwick, the co-founder of IAC owned video site Vimeo, left the company today. The reason? Apparently Lodwick didn’t see eye to eye with the IAC brass on creative issues, and specifically had a run in with IAC chief Barry Diller three weeks ago.
That’s not surprising, given the picture Lodwick chose to include with his goodbye post. A source close to Lodwick says “he was let go.”
Lodwick’s girlfriend, Julia Allison (who made a scandal at our August Capital party last summer - see video here), wrote a blog post saying “Dear Jakob, I wish I hadn’t found out you left the company you’ve been with for the last seven years from your blog. Love, Julia.”
Lots of drama out in NYC this evening.
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 Flux, a new social network joint venture between Viacom and SocialProject, had a limited launch in September.
The platform is the cornerstone of Viacom’s social network strategy. Instead of building independent networks for MTV and its hundreds of other brands, they’ve built a distributed platform that shares users, infrastructure and content, but allows for distinct branding and community building around each property. And Flux isn’t just for Viacom - third parties are using it as well.
When Flux launched it had only a few hand picked non-Viacom partners. Today they are opening up the platform for anyone that wants to join.
Like Ning, it’s fairly easy to create a Flux social network. The look and feel can be customized via templates or by uploading your own CSS, and the network can be mapped to your domain name.
Once created any Flux member can join your network with a single click. Since Flux is already gaining users via their launched Viacom and other properties, this gives young communities a deeper pool of users to draw from. And the fact that new users do not need to create a new profile, friends list or login credentials gives them a greater incentive to join. User data is exportable, Flux says, if the partner creates a privacy policy stating that.
 Partners have three integration choices. fShare, the basic integration, allows users to take content from the site and easily embed it into other social networks. Flux Lite allows partners to create a basic social network. Flux custom gives nearly full control over the look and feel and has additional features. Partners can choose any integration, it just takes a little more work to use the custom features. Flux will add new developer features over time as well. The chart to the right (click for larger view) shows the various options.
We’ve created a test social network on Flux, at techcrunch.flux.com. And we’re also integrating their fshare functionality into the main TechCrunch site as an illustration of how it works - see the button below each post.
Flux partners can choose to show Flux ads on the site, or use their own. Flux says they are currently selling at a $1.50 CPM and will split that 50/50 with partners. If a partner chooses to display their own ads instead, they must split revenue with Flux 50/50 as well.
Flux v. Ning
Flux and Ning have very similar features and will compete for communities looking to build a social network (and there are lots of other choices as well). Ning has an established platform, lots of money, and 130,000 existing communities (including Playboy). Flux also has a great platform, and the leverage of all the Viacom properties to promote it.
Ning sees the threat from Flux. CEO Gina Bianchini wrote a fiery point-by-point comparison of the two services earlier this week - Flux disputes some of the facts.
Ning is currently supporting Google’s Open Social platform. Flux says they will fully support Open Social beginning in January.
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 When Facebook took a $240 million investment from Microsoft last month at a $15 billion valuation, they became, in theory, one of the most valuable Internet-only companies on the planet.
But that valuation was tenuous at best. Microsoft and Facebook expanded their year-old advertising relationship as part of the deal. And Facebook was unable to get a third party to pony up cash to justify the valuation. Only a single (financially conflicted) entity was willing to say Facebook was worth $15 billion - that wasn’t good enough supporting evidence for the valuation.
Until now, that is. Kara Swisher is reporting that Facebook has grabbed another investor - $60 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.
Facebook has now raised just shy of $340 million in capital. That’s enough to keep them going as a private entity for years, if they choose to do so. Their $15 billion valuation may or may not be real, but they certainly have a lot of cash to fiddle with.
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 I first met Sarah Meyers when she crashed our 2006 party at August Capital. She was booted, but got enough video footage to make this video. This year she was back at the party, but as an invitee - see one of her videos here.
Meyers now lives in New York, and has been working on a new live daily tech show. It hasn’t officially launched, but her first shows started streaming earlier this week at PopSnap.net.
The show shows live daily. A time will eventually be nailed down, she says, but for now you have to check the calendar (powered by 30Boxes) to see exactly when it goes on the air. When the show is not being shown live, the last show is played on a loop. Eventually, clicking on the video will start it from the beginning.
Users can comment on the show via an embedded meebo chat widget. The show itself is powered by Mogulus, a live streaming video startup we covered back in June.
The show is clearly still working through some kinks, so be kind. But Sarah’s charisma comes out strongly in these first few episodes, and it’s clear that she will have a large following of loyal viewers.
Check out the show now and give your feedback through the chat widget. The site will officially launch in December, and archives will become available then. We are going to be one of the charter sponsors of the show.
Update: Well, she shut the site down.
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