ペタ (Peta)

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

~ the obit ~

Ameba Blog is the largest blogging platform in Japan, the one with the celebrities on it, run by CyberAgent since 2004. On 14 November 2006 it shipped a button. Pressing it on somebody's blog left a mark on their page saying you had been there. You did not have to read the post. You did not have to write anything. The whole content of the message was that you existed and had passed by, and the Japanese word for the sound of a stamp coming down is peta.

mixi had already made something adjacent famous, the ashiato or foot-marks, which logged your visitors automatically whether you liked it or not. Peta inverted that: nothing was recorded unless the visitor chose to press. Bloggers who wanted them put up a line reading ペタしてね, peta me please. In the West the closest relative is the thing LinkedIn charges you to see, which tells you how differently the same idea can be made to feel.

It ran for just under fourteen years, and the interesting part of its history is not that it ended. It is that CyberAgent tried to end it in 2015 and failed, and had to come back five years later to finish the job.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ranking on the button ~

Within a year the button had grown a ranking system. Receive one peta and you were ペタ10級, tenth grade, with a baby on the button. Two or three moved you up to ninth grade and a chick, four to six to a pug. The ladder ran all the way to ペタ1級 at a hundred or more, and the picture changed as you climbed it.

It also grew the problem that every free gesture on the internet eventually grows. By 28 August 2007, nine months after launch, CyberAgent was posting about system load caused by spam peta and imposing a cap of 500 per user per day. A month later it was adding servers. In June 2008 it cut how long your peta log was kept from one month down to twenty days, purely to reduce load. Seasonal character buttons appeared for Christmas and Tanabata. In November 2013 the button was quietly moved off the bottom of each article and onto the profile page, which is the sort of demotion a feature does not usually recover from.

~ the year they lost ~

On 18 August 2015 the staff blog announced that peta would end on 11 November, with the log closing a week later. The reason given was that users had migrated to the like button Ameba had launched in 2013, so peta had served its purpose. The post collected 4,074 likes and 3,000 comments, and 3,000 was the maximum a post could hold.

The objections were practical. Likes did not work on feature phones, and a peta could mark a visit to a blog that had not posted anything, which a like could not. CyberAgent told ITmedia a week later that it had no plans to reconsider. On 9 November, two days before the switch-off, it posted again to say that after many messages from users it had decided to keep the service running. That post drew 1,127 comments.

~ five hours to say goodbye ~

The second notice came on 28 August 2020, signed by an Ameba product manager, and this time the reasoning was about the company rather than the feature. There was overlap with likes and comments, and with reblogs and follows. There were also only so many people on the Ameba team, and keeping every existing feature improved was becoming unrealistic. Why peta specifically: because it was the oldest, and the system underneath it cost more to run than the newer things did.

Then they fumbled the execution. The announcement had given a date but not a time, so when the button stopped working at noon on 27 October a lot of people were caught mid-goodbye. At 15:25 the staff blog apologized for insufficient notice and said it would switch peta back on at around five that afternoon, so that everyone could enjoy it one last time. It ran for another evening and was turned off for good at two the next afternoon. The log stayed readable until 16 November.

The 2015 obituary drew 4,074 likes. The 2020 one drew 1,072, and 189 comments. Nobody in the Japanese press wrote about the actual ending, while the 2015 near-miss had been covered twice. The domain peta.ameba.jp still has a DNS record today and answers nothing on either port, which is about the right amount of ceremony for a button whose entire message was that somebody had been here.

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