BlogPeople (ブログピープル)

» see blogpeople.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 5 November 2003 a service called ブログピープル started trial operation, run by a small Tokyo outfit called AIVY Communications together with Fan Communications, the company behind the affiliate network A8.net. It described itself in one line on the front page: a service that notifies you when blog articles are updated. Two days later it had 1,062 registered sites.

That sentence needs unpacking for anyone who did not keep a weblog in 2003, because the problem it solved has been invisible for fifteen years. There was no feed reader on most people's machines and no algorithmic timeline anywhere. If you wanted to know whether the eight blogs you read had posted anything, you visited all eight. The fix the era settled on was the ping: when you published a post, your software sent a short notification to a central server, and that server told anyone who was listening.

BlogPeople was Japan's version of that plumbing, and it added the piece that made it social. You registered a list of the blogs you read, it appeared in your sidebar, and each name in it carried a mark showing how recently that person had posted. A blogroll had been a dead list of links until then.

~ the record ~

~ how a ping worked ~

The technical surface was tiny. Blog software pointed at an update-notification URL, originally one ending in servlet/weblogUpdates, and sent a standard weblogUpdates ping whenever a post went out. In June 2007 the service added a second, shorter address at /ping/ and told everyone they could use either. That is close to the entire integration story across seventeen and a half years.

None of this was Japanese in origin. The ping convention was general internet plumbing and there were equivalents in every language, Technorati and weblogs.com being the ones the English-speaking web remembers. What was local was the directory on top: the Japanese blog hosts it pulled from, and a user base writing in a script the global services indexed badly. The protocol crossed borders without any trouble, but the communities built on it stayed where they were, which is why each language region ended up running a ping server of its own.

~ the blogroll as a product ~

On top of the ping, BlogPeople ran the things a central registry lets you run. It published a ranking by how many other sites linked to you, alongside others by posting frequency and by genre. It also had a lookup where you entered a URL and got back the list of sites pointing at it, which in 2004 was a hard question to answer and is the same question Technorati built a company on.

The survival time is the part that gets me. The Japanese blog boom crested around 2005. Twitter arrived in Japanese in 2008 and took the short-post habit away with it, after which feed readers shrank into a niche interest for a certain kind of person. BlogPeople went on receiving pings and updating link lists through all of it, into an internet where almost nothing still sent a ping to anybody.

~ the wrong day of the week ~

The notice went up on 13 May 2021 at 1:29 in the afternoon, posted by an account named aivy, under a heading marked important. The text is short and does not reach for anything. BlogPeople started in November 2003, it says, and about seventeen and a half years later, with the times having changed, the operating costs could no longer be covered and providing the service had become difficult. Service would end on 31 May. Users were asked to go change their blog settings.

The notice gives that date as 2021年5月31日（木）. Thursday. The 31st of May 2021 was a Monday, and the tombstone that replaced the front page afterwards has it right, 5月31日（月）, in the past tense. Somebody typed the wrong character into the goodbye for a service that had spent seventeen and a half years keeping track of exactly when things happened.

The ending itself was gentler than the notice implied. Ping reception and link-list delivery kept running until the end of June, the tombstone explained, except that the link lists would no longer update. For one more month the machinery sat there accepting notifications from whatever blogs were still configured to send them, then showing everybody the same sidebar as the day before. The domain was parked by October 2023 and is now an affiliate page recommending online casinos.

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