Ameba Now

» see now.ameba.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

ameba now was on the japan side of the japanese-language internet i was not part of. in those days i was on twitter proper, in whatever mix of turkish and english the timeline happened to be. by december '09 when now launched, twitter had already taken most of the microblog demand in the markets i was reading. cyberagent's move was to run a twitter-shaped product on top of its own ameba blog network, where the celebrity accounts and the paid-fan audience were already sitting.

the mobile client shipped on 8 december 2009. the pc web version came two days later. posts were capped at 140 characters, with emoji and image support. there was a follow graph. there was a curated "celebrity now" section that surfaced posts from the ameba-affiliated stars. the pitch inside cyberagent, quoted in later coverage, was that the product would expand from a celebrity core out to a general audience rather than the other way around. that path never converted.

honestly. the twitter dominance in japan by 2010 was already visible in the numbers, and the same wave that carried it into being one of the highest per-capita twitter markets in the world was passing over the domestic microblog clones on the way in. line came in as the messenger layer starting in june 2011. between the two of them there was not much room left for a japan-only twitter shape.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

ameba now sat as a tab inside the larger ameba portal, right next to the blog side and later next to pigg. you signed in with the same ameba account. you posted short messages into a feed indexed by follow-relationships. the celebrity accounts were the traffic engine. tarento and other tv personalities already had ameba blogs, and the now feed was a shorter surface for the same audience. for a regular user it looked like twitter with a different visual skin and a different paid layer around it.

~ the postmortem ~

cyberagent announced the shutdown in the summer of 2017. the last posts went through on 6 november 2017. by then the ameba portal itself was pivoting toward the blog side and toward pigg spinoffs on smartphones. now was the piece that had never grown out of the celebrity-driven loop it started in. the ja.wikipedia entry gives the shutdown as a single line with no explanation of the business decision behind it.

~ the inheritance ~

ameba now sat in the part of japanese internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. the tarento economy it fed off had already moved to twitter proper by the mid-2010s. instagram picked up the visual side. cyberagent kept ameba going as a blog and virtual-world brand and moved most of its energy into mobile games. the now product name went dormant with the shutdown and did not come back under any other cyberagent surface.

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