au one My Page

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

~ the eulogy ~

au one My Page was a personal start page for a Japanese mobile phone. KDDI launched it in October 2006, and the pitch was the one iGoogle and My Yahoo! were making on desktops at the same time: a page that is yours, with the parts you care about arranged the way you want them, plus somewhere to keep your files. On a handset in 2006 that second half carried more weight than it now sounds like it did. The phone itself held almost nothing, and the carrier's servers were the only storage most people had.

By the end it was seven products wearing one name. There was My Page itself, a Data Folder and an Album for files and photos, a blog, a calendar, a location search called My Area Search, and My Site, which was a list of the places you went. KDDI and Okinawa Cellular announced on 1 November 2010 that all of it would stop on 31 March 2011, and the trade press carried it that afternoon.

The wind-down was staged across five months and each piece got its own date. New blogs could not be created from the day of the announcement. The Album stopped taking new users on 30 November, and registration for the whole portal closed on 13 December. Posting to existing blogs stopped on 20 December, which left three months in which you could read what you had written and not add to it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the reason they actually gave ~

Most shutdown notices say something about concentrating resources. This one made two specific claims about how the world had changed underneath the product. Customers had moved their data storage onto external memory cards, and search had improved to the point where people could reach what they needed through a search engine instead of through a curated page of links.

Both halves are an admission that the product's two functions had been taken over by something else. Storage went to a microSD card you owned, and navigation went to a search box. Then KDDI added the number: usage had peaked in 2008 and had been falling since. A company will usually describe a dying product as being retired to make way for something better. Naming the year the graph turned over is unusually candid, and it dates the decline two full years before anyone was told.

~ nothing moved unless you moved it ~

Four of the seven services were given an exit, and every one of those exits required you to use it yourself. The blog could be exported to livedoor Blog from 22 December and to Seesaa Blog from the twenty-third. The calendar could be pushed to Google Calendar. The Data Folder and the Album had no destination at all, so KDDI's instruction was to attach your files to a message in au one Mail and send them somewhere else.

The reporting at the time was blunt about what this meant: no saving or migration would happen automatically, and the user had to perform each step. The Seesaa route closed on 24 March, a week before the end, so even the people who acted had a shorter window than the headline date suggested. Whether a blog survived came down to whether its author had read a notice on a phone screen the previous December.

There is a sting buried in those file-rescue instructions. The recommended way to get your photos out of au one My Page was to email them to yourself with au one Mail, and au one Mail was itself shut down on 30 September 2013. The lifeboat went down thirty months behind the ship.

~ what it says about carrier portals ~

This grave is one of a set. Japanese carriers all built walled portals in the 2000s with mail and storage inside them, and the entire category was obsolete within a few years of the smartphone arriving. An iPhone or an Android handset turned up already holding its own files, with an app store selling a better version of every individual piece the carrier had bundled.

What is specific to au one My Page is the shape of the exit. KDDI did not simply switch it off; it wrote migration paths for four of the seven services and told users where to go. Every destination it named belonged to somebody else, from the two blog hosts down to Google's calendar, because by 2011 there was no part of this that KDDI wanted to keep running itself.

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