It's interesting to read this, since I was a member of the fandom contingent of LJ from 2002 to about 2005. I guess that makes me a social deviant. ;-)

Anyway, there's a grain of truth to this. The fandom community is disproportionately early adopters. After all, people with mainstream interests can hang out with their friends in real life instead of meeting them online. Many of my fandom friends were among the first users of GMail (I got my invite from one of them), they were among the first to switch to FaceBook when it opened up to non-college students, and now they're the ones that are on Twitter and checking out FriendFeed.

However, I think there were many, many other problems with LiveJournal that prevented it from gaining mainstream adoption:

1.) Until about 2005-2006, the front page never really explained what LiveJournal does or why you should have one. If you didn't have friends that were already on LiveJournal, you didn't know how to use it.

2.) It was plagued by perpetual scaling problems - in 02-04, it was virtually impossible to get your friends page to display. It was as bad as Friendster, and worse than nearly every other social networking site.

3.) Their decision to open-source their code meant that whenever they did anything controversial, someone would set up a competing site and a large fraction of their userbase would migrate, coming back when that site went out of business. When they had their scaling woes and required invite codes to get a new account, everyone went to DeadJournal. When they lowered the number of free icons, everyone went to GreatestJournal for icon hosting. When they pissed off the dev community by calling them ("Nobody but me could run this site" -- Brad Fitzpatrick), Plogs.net got started. When they banned fandom_wank, it just migrated to Journalfen.net. It's really not a brilliant idea to charge money for your service and then give away your source code for free.

4.) They were just too early. Same reason that YouTube, Comcast, and Verizon Fios got rich providing the same service that Enron Broadband had wasted billions on. Mainstream adopters were not ready to shift their social lives online in 2002.

In particular, the article suggests that if they'd let you import external RSS feeds into your LJ friends page, they could've become the default feedreader for the web. There're good reasons to believe this isn't true, notably:

a.) This describes Bloglines, which came out in 2003 and wasn't notably more successful.

b.) It does not describe FaceBook or MySpace, which were successful. Really, the whole "feed" concept seems to be a bust among mainstream users - PointCast failed in Web 1.0, RSS never caught on outside the technorati, and FriendFeed is early-adopter only.

c.) They did let you import external RSS feeds into your Friends page - it's just that free users were limited to no more than 3 feeds (paid users still had a limit, but it was higher), making it not so useful.

The article also mentions pingback support - my friend implemented trackback support for LiveJournal in 2003, and it sat in the CVS repository for 2 years without ever being merged into the production codebase.

Really, if I had to pick a reason LJ went nowhere, it's simply that it was too early. And it's not like it was a super-huge failure too: the founder still got his f-u money.