Ameba Requestion

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

~ the eulogy ~

Ameba Requestion opened on 17 April 2008 and called itself みんなのお宝情報マーケット, everybody's treasure-information market. The word market is doing real work there. Impress described the plan a few weeks before launch: you picked out a blogger you wanted to consult, you paid them in AmeGold, and the exchange happened on a closed page that only the two parties could open. Advice arrived as a transaction, with a counterparty rather than a thread.

Yahoo! Chiebukuro, the Japanese Yahoo! Answers, had the country's question habit locked up by then, and it worked the other way around. There you asked for free and somebody answered because they felt like it. Requestion inverted the direction of effort. The person with the knowledge had to move first, putting it on a shelf and then waiting for somebody to buy.

The economy only existed inside Ameba. AmeGold was CyberAgent's own currency and it only bought things on CyberAgent's own platform, so the entire trade in expertise sat inside one company's blog service. I have never paid anybody for an answer to anything. The quiet suspicion that hardly anybody else has either is the wall this product spent eighteen months walking into.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a rekumii was ~

The unit of trade was a リクミィ, a rekumii, and the verbs around it came from shopping rather than from conversation. You 出品 a rekumii, the word Japanese auction sites use for putting an item up. Buyers 購入 it. You could edit a listing, and listings carried a rating from the people who had paid. The icon set the site shipped with included one marked professional, so somewhere in there was a tier of answerers the service vouched for.

There was also a 即答リクミィ, an instant-answer rekumii, which is advice written ahead of time rather than in response to anybody. Those sat in a management screen with a download button, and the file came out as CSV. That detail does real work at the end of this story.

~ the bug they stopped fixing ~

On 10 June 2009 something broke. From a mobile phone you could no longer list a rekumii or answer one, and since Ameba in 2009 was substantially a keitai service, that was most of the floor. It did not get fixed.

Six days later the Ameba staff blog explained why. CyberAgent had been investigating and had found that the problem could not be repaired before the service ended, because the service was ending. Buyers who had paid for an answer that never came got refunded, and the answerers who had been unable to reply were granted the AmeGold the reply was worth. The same post set 23 June as the last day for buying, listing or editing anything, and put the end of the service itself in mid-August.

~ the moving van ~

What stood at requestion.ameba.jp after that was a relocation page. The destination was Sooda!, a knowledge-sharing service with a free section called とくネタ, and the offer on the table was that your old rekumii could come along. You downloaded your instant-answer file from the management screen, uploaded it to Sooda!, picked which entries should appear there, and the move was done. Registering got you ten AmeGold and completing the migration got you another ten.

The page advertising all this contains a small, perfect mistake. The campaign banner says the window runs from 19 August. The body text says 8月20日（水）, Wednesday 20 August. In 2009 the Wednesday was the nineteenth. Somebody changed the date and did not change the day of the week, and the page carried the discrepancy for the whole six weeks it stood there, which is six weeks longer than anybody was still reading it. The closing date on both halves agreed: 30 September 2009. The host went dark the next day.

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