Amebata Kaigi

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

~ the goodbye ~

Idobata kaigi is the Japanese phrase for the talk that happens around a well, the neighborhood gossip circle, and CyberAgent built a product by swapping the first syllables for Ameba. Amebata Kaigi opened on 11 March 2008 as a message board bolted to the side of Japan's largest blog service, and its selling point was speed: it used Ajax, so a thread updated under you and the thing felt less like a forum and more like a chat window that happened to keep a transcript.

It worked from a PC and from a keitai, which in 2008 Japan was the part that decided whether a social product lived. You could post text and emoji, and you could drop in video from AmebaVision or from Nico Nico Douga, so a thread could turn into a playlist without leaving the page. Thirteen categories at launch ran from breaking news to a relay-novel board where strangers wrote a story one paragraph at a time. Busy threads earned their creator Ameba Points under a feature called today's teppan.

The important detail is the one in the terms rather than the feature list. Posting did not require registration. You could reply anonymously with your ID hidden, and an Ameba account was only needed to start a thread or follow updates. Every other surface on Ameba was tied to a blog carrying your handle, and this was the one room where that was optional. The traffic followed the option.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the board was for ~

What grew there was narichat, roleplay chat, where people took on a character and stayed in it across hundreds of replies. The Ajax refresh is why: on a conventional board you posted and waited and reloaded, and in-character back-and-forth died of latency. Here you could keep pace with somebody, and keeping pace is most of what sustained roleplay needs.

Moderation was partly handed to the floor through a one-vote-to-delete button, and Japanese Wikipedia's account of the board records that the operators were slow when a category filled up with threads breaking the rules. The same looseness is what made it comfortable to use.

~ the last fix ~

On 6 July 2010 the Ameba staff blog posted the closure. The wording did not hedge. Spam replies from dating-site and adult operators were rampant on Amebata Kaigi, and ahead of the shutdown, as of that same 6 July, posting a reply in a new thread would require you to be logged in.

So a board built on not needing an account spent its final five weeks demanding one. The notice pointed users at Gurppo, Ameba's group feature, as the place to keep talking with people who shared their interests. Japanese Wikipedia's account adds a second cause alongside the spam, which is that the two products had come to overlap on function, so the audience was being moved somewhere it was half-sitting already.

~ the skin went too ~

Buried at the bottom of the same notice is a very small casualty. There had been an Amebata Kaigi design skin for your PC blog, a way of flying the flag of a message board on a page that was not the message board. It was discontinued on the same date. Anyone using it was switched to the Basic skin, with an apology and a suggestion that they go and pick something else.

387 people left a comment under that post. The board closed on Monday 9 August 2010, two days short of two years and five months old, and the last thing CyberAgent did for the people who had lived there was set their wallpaper back to the default.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »