The most distinguishing feature of LiveJournal is the "friends list", which gives it a strong social aspect instead of being a simple blog or diary service. The friends list is used to provide various syndication and privacy services, described below.
LiveJournal allows users to customize their accounts in several ways. The S2 programming language makes journal templates easy to manage, similar to blog templates used by WordPress and other popular systems. Users may upload a few graphical avatars, or "userpics", which appear next to the username in prominent areas as it would on an Internet forum. Paid account holders are given full access to S2 management and more userpics, as well as other features.
Each user also has a "User Info" page, which is used to describe personal interests, similar to most social networking websites. It can contain a variety of data including contact information, a biography, images (linked from off-site sources), and lists of friends, interests, and communities to which the user belongs.
LiveJournal also allows "phone posts", where a user can call into the system and record an entry. Livejournal at this time has a very limited search functionality, with users finding it difficult to search through friends,community and their own journals. LJ Search Engine launched Jan 2006 provides an external service useful for doing research on users and posts in Livejournal
