CURURU

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

~ the eulogy ~

NHN Japan came into the Japanese market with three products and lost two of them inside a year. NAVER search closed at the end of January 2005. The NAVER portal closed on 31 August 2005. The survivor was NAVER Blog, which had gone into beta on 28 June 2004 and launched properly on 26 July with unlimited storage and no fee, and which had worked well enough that the company kept it while everything around it was being shut off.

Keeping it meant changing it. On 2 June 2005, one day later than announced because the work was not finished, NAVER Blog became CURURU: the same blog with a social network built around it. The stated reason was revenue. A blog with 400,000 free accounts and no way to charge for anything is an expense, and the theory in 2005 was that an SNS layer on top would fix that.

The shape of it was a public blog anybody could read sitting next to a members-only profile page you could search by area and by interest. Under both of those were user-run circles with their own chat and message boards. Posting to the blog auto-tagged the entry from extracted keywords, which was ahead of where most Japanese blog software was at the time. Real-name registration was offered as a way to find people you already knew, and was withdrawn in December 2006 on privacy grounds.

None of it worked commercially. The blog kept its audience and the social layer around it never produced the revenue that had justified building it, and for four years NHN Japan carried the whole thing as a cost.

~ the dossier ~

~ where everyone went ~

The end was announced on 11 May 2009 for 30 November that year, with new registrations closed the same day. NHN Japan's wording was that the economic climate forced it to concentrate on selected businesses and that continuing a service which had never generated revenue was not possible. A backup tool went out in June so people could pull their posts down as HTML, with an MT export for anybody moving to a competitor. On 2 November the closure was pushed to 31 March 2010 to give that process more room.

Somebody counted where they went. A company called 1st Class ran the tally through its own blog search engine, Minakoe, reading the relocation notice board that CURURU users had put up themselves, and published the result on the day the service died. Ameba took 28.15 percent of the people who said where they were going and FC2 took 23.68 percent. Yahoo! Blog and mixi split most of what was left, at around four percent each. It is an unusually specific record of a small population moving house, and it exists only because the users built the board themselves.

~ the second attempt ~

NHN Japan did not leave. It came back with NAVER Matome in 2009 and with the NAVER search brand again in 2013, and in between it shipped LINE, which took Japan in a way nothing the company had built before came close to. The corporate structure kept renaming itself around that success until the parent was simply called LINE, and CURURU sits in its history as a five-year detour that produced nothing except a line item and a lesson about what Japanese users would not pay for.

From here the whole sequence is invisible. A Korean company failing at search in Japan, then at a portal, then at a social blog, never reached Turkey at any point. What reached Turkey was the messenger that came out of the same office fifteen months after CURURU was switched off, and even that arrived as a name you saw in app store charts rather than something anybody around me installed. Turkey went from MSN to WhatsApp with nothing in between.

The domain is alive today and belongs to somebody else entirely. Type cururu.jp into a browser now and you get a Japanese matchmaking service with a tagline about two people's story starting from a liking. The old logo, an orange mark next to a wordmark with a beta tag still attached to it four years after launch, survives only in the archive.

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