Cafesta

» see cafesta.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There were two companies called TTNet in 2002 and I was paying one of them. Mine was the Türk Telekom arm that answered when the modem finished making its noise. The other was Tokyo Telecommunication Network, an electricity-utility spinoff that sold cheap long distance around Kanto, and on 24 July 2002 it opened an avatar community called Cafesta. Same initials, no relation. I had no idea the second one existed until I went looking for this grave.

The site was built around a personal page called MyHP. Members got a diary, a profile, a public guest board and a list of cafe friends whose updates they could watch without visiting. Everything around that was a shop. Avatars started in a t-shirt and jeans and the rest cost Cafesta Cash, while the site itself stayed free, which is the detail that later decided everything. Browser chat held six avatars at once, the recommended operating systems topped out at Windows XP, and Mac users were warned in advance that parts of it would not work.

It moved through owners the way small Japanese web properties did in that decade. In August 2004 the business was carved into a joint venture called TAON, 65 percent owned by Daum of South Korea. In March 2007 TAON was renamed Lycos Japan, because Daum had bought Lycos. In March 2008 it was sold on to A&T, a dormant shell inside the PC maker MCJ, which renamed itself Cafesta Co. and planned to hang a group portal off its hardware business. By then the visible user base was mostly teenagers who had never known the site to cost anything.

~ the case file ~

~ december 2008 ~

On 25 November 2008 a director leaked the company's finances on his own MyHP. Ten days later the official version went out by email to every member: operating at the current level was not sustainable, and would people please consider a Cafesta Passport subscription or buy some avatars. No target figure and no plan, just the ask.

On 15 December the president gave an interview that went considerably further than the email had. Free operation was impossible and the site was going fully paid. He also said the users he had acquired were not the users he had expected, and that he could not understand a customer base which treated free as the natural state of things. Restrictions on free accounts were scheduled for 20 January 2009 and shelved on the 14th, which left a company that had announced it could not survive without charging, and then did not charge.

~ what june 2004 attached to it ~

On 1 June 2004 an eleven-year-old girl in Sasebo, Nagasaki killed a classmate with a box cutter at their elementary school. Both girls kept diary pages on Cafesta. In January of that year the older one had posted a Battle Royale fan story to her MyHP with thirty-eight characters in it, the size of their class, built out of names close to their classmates, one of them carrying the victim's surname and dying in the text.

Reporting at the time did not name the site. It is named in the case material and in Cafesta's own history, and it is why a free avatar portal for Japanese kids sits in a murder file. The product did nothing here except work as designed: a page where two children wrote things down, hosted by a company that at the time sold long distance calls.

~ the closing ~

Credit card processing was switched off on 15 January 2009. The avatar mall stopped getting new stock. On 30 April the company announced it would not collect the Passport fee due on 1 May, calling it thanks for everyone's loyalty, and stopped accepting new Passport members on the same day. The notice arrived on 8 May: closing 31 May, with a migration campaign to @games, an avatar community run by GCREST.

Then it missed its own deadline. Logins were still working through the summer and only failed on 27 August, when the front page became a GCREST migration notice and the rest of the site answered with a stub or a 404. Account transfers were supposed to end on 30 June 2009 and actually closed on 5 January 2010. Whatever made it across lasted until 31 March 2017, when @games retired its own social features and deleted it.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »