frepa

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

~ the obituary ~

Invitation-only was the shape of the mid-2000s social web, and in Japan mixi owned it. livedoor's answer began on 17 January 2005 as a beta called livedoor Friend Park, at fp.livedoor.com, free to use and closed to anyone an existing member had not vouched for. It launched with private messaging and interest communities, plus a diary of the kind every Japanese social site of the period carried, and it hooked into livedoor Blog and livedoor Avatar with the company's shopping site and DVD rental service promised for later. Internet Watch noted that there was no date yet for a full launch and no mobile support.

The design was the thing people remarked on. The Japanese encyclopedia entry puts it bluntly, that the site looked extremely similar to mixi, and nobody at the time pretended otherwise. What livedoor was building was a copy, and the only question was what it would do differently.

On 26 October 2005 it answered that. The official service would start on 1 November under a shortened name, livedoor frepa, and registration would move from invitations to open sign-up. Along with it came unified community management and a feed of the newest photos your friends had posted to livedoor pics. The invitation wall was the one piece of mixi's model that frepa discarded, and discarding it is what the service turned out to be for.

It worked. frepa reached roughly 950,000 members and sat second in Japan behind mixi, ahead of everything else, and contemporary writing records it passing GREE on member count for a period after the gates came open.

~ the case file ~

~ taking the door off ~

What frepa opened its gates into was a company about to come apart. In January 2006, about eleven weeks after open registration began, prosecutors moved on livedoor. Takafumi Horie left the management of the company and the business was broken into pieces and sold off, and by 2007 only the portal survived as a separate entity, pointed at user-generated content because that was what was left of it. frepa spent most of its life as an asset inside an estate being broken up, and the navigation bar on its final pages reads like the inventory it had been filed under: blog, profile, cosplay, net anime, web search.

~ noon on a tuesday ~

The closure notice survives in the Wayback copy, and what makes it worth reading is the precision. All frepa services ended on Tuesday 25 November 2008 at 12:00. The reason livedoor offered is a formula that translates to something like "entirely at our own convenience, due to circumstances," which is to say no reason at all, and the registered members' personal data was deleted afterward under company policy. The page signs off with the long-patronage phrase every Japanese service reaches for on the way out.

Some of the membership went to nowa, the livedoor blog service that ran on an internal currency, and when nowa closed four months later they moved again, mostly to Wassr. The archive shows the frepa homepage at 5,949 bytes on 25 August 2008 and 2,993 bytes on 1 December, which is the whole event in two numbers. Japan's second-largest social network was switched off in the middle of a working day, and the company that did it would not say why.

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