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Open Diary is an online diary community, an early example of social networking software. Founded on October 19, 1998, it is the oldest such community on the internet. The founder of Open Diary and its sister site Teen Open Diary is Bruce Ableson, known on the Open Diary website by the title of his diary, The DiaryMaster. As of 2005, there are over 400,000 diaries on OpenDiary.com, including diaries from 63 different countries and all 7 continents. Open Diary was featured in the 2005 book Net Success Interviews by E. Loughane, which is a compilation of interviews with "40 successful CEOs/founders of revolutionary internet companies."
History In 2001, Open Diary introduced the premium "Open Diary Plus", a paid version of the original "Free Open Diary". The change was attributed to declining revenue from pop-up and banner advertisements. In addition to freedom from advertisements, paid diaries have additional functionality, including the ability to block other users from reading the diary, increased searching ability, password protection, diary chapters and the ability to view all notes left by the diarist. One of the many features of Open Diary is the existence of "interests." These are ways for the diarist to show his or her personality and to meet other people who share similar interests. Unfortunately, these interests aren't free from bias. Interests such as, "Anti-Christian" are permitted. However, interests such as "Anti-pagan" are often deleted by the Diary Master. Despite this major shortcoming, Open Diary is large, close-knit, community of people who enjoy sharing their lives with each other. On September 11, 2004, the Open Diary website was hacked, resulting in the loss of all diary entries written from July 2004 to the time of the attack. On February 2, 2006, a new "Lifetime Membership" was introduced for a fee of $100. The DiaryMaster stated that this new membership level was created to raise money after declining subscription rates in the period following the 2004 hacker attack caused Open Diary to go into debt. On April 26, 2006, a message board component was added to the OpenDiary website. | ||||||||
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