Chirpstory

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

~ the eulogy ~

Togetter solved a small problem very well. Twitter in 2009 and 2010 produced conversations that were impossible to read after the fact, because the thread model barely existed and the search index forgot things after a week, and Togetter let somebody gather the relevant tweets into a page with an order and a title. In Japan this became infrastructure. Journalists cited it and arguments got archived on it, and it is still running today.

Chirpstory was the attempt to sell that abroad. It went live on Wednesday 8 December 2010, and Weekly ASCII's writeup that day used the phrase 本日サービスイン, live today, which tells you the launch and the announcement were the same event. INTERNET Watch framed it as Togetter going overseas. The feature list had a couple of things the Japanese site did not: layouts that made a curated set look like a foreign news site, and the ability to pull in material from YouTube and Twitpic rather than tweets alone.

The timing was deliberate and it was terrible. Storify had opened its beta in September 2010, three months earlier, built by Americans for American newsrooms, and it took the journalism market almost immediately. Storify became the verb media schools taught. Chirpstory had the same idea and a healthier parent company behind it, but no route at all into the newsrooms that decided the category.

Then came the turn nobody had priced in. Storify was acquired by Livefyre in 2013 and Adobe bought Livefyre three years later, and on 16 May 2018 Adobe closed Storify down and took every story stored in it. Chirpstory was still serving pages thirty months later.

~ the dossier ~

~ english was the whole idea ~

The description tag on Chirpstory's own last page reads "Where viral contents from Twitter, FB, & IG put together." That sentence is written by somebody who speaks very good English as a second language, and the giveaway is the plural on a word English normally treats as a mass noun. I write in this language all day and I produce the same class of mistake in it, which is why the line reads to me as the product in miniature rather than as a joke. The premise was that the English-speaking internet would adopt a Japanese tool, and the English-speaking internet is less forgiving about that particular seam than about almost any other.

The rest of the seam was structural. Togetter's value in Japan came from being where the Japanese conversation already was, which is a position you cannot build abroad by translating the interface. An anglophone who wanted to curate tweets in 2012 had Storify, and after Storify had Wakelet, with no reason worth the effort to learn a second site whose community lived in another language.

~ what the front page still says ~

chirpstory.com answers today. It returns a five-kilobyte page carrying the old title, "Curate, compile, and create stories", under a copyright line reading 2020. The only other thing on it is one sentence: this service ended in November 2020. There is no migration offer and no link back to the parent company.

The Internet Archive puts a surprisingly fine point on when that sentence appeared. The capture from 21:58 UTC on 29 November 2020 is the working site, twenty-five kilobytes of it. The capture from 03:54 UTC the next morning carries the shutdown sentence, and so does every capture after it, unchanged, into 2022. In Tokyo that window is the morning of Monday 30 November 2020. Japanese Wikipedia dates the closure to September, which is when the Chirpstory account posted about it on Instagram, so the announcement and the switch were two months apart.

Togetter Inc. is fine. It launched a simpler sibling called min.t in August 2019 and ran that until January 2025, retiring it on the day the rebuilt service, posfie, opened. Fifteen years on from Chirpstory, the company that could not sell tweet curation in English is still selling it in Japanese.

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