Please exit the building in a calm and orderly fashion

Please exit the building in a calm and orderly fashion

My thanks to kest, who pointed out that Livejournal have just laid off a fair chunk of their US staff, including all the developers and designers. I have backed up my journal and comments placed on my posts just in case. I used this Python tool to do it, although I understand that there several alternatives. I don't anticipate the immediate collapse of Livejournal, but I would not be surprised to see deterioration in the quality of service and the attitude to users customers consumers.

Are you thinking of leaving Livejournal? Do you already blog elsewhere? How do you keep track of your friends' writings? I quite like the Livejournal friends page and I'm not sure how to replace it. I really hate the Facebook news feed, which is just an endless stream of drivel that is a pain to filter out. I like Google Reader for reading RSS feeds of public blogs, but I don't think there's any good way to keep track of non-public (e.g. friends-locked posts on LJ) stuff if all your friends are on different sites. Does anybody have any suggestions? I'm curious about FriendFeed, but I don't think it's a solution to this particular problem.