Friends Note

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

~ the obit ~

The Android build was au-only and arrived preinstalled on the handset. The iPhone build was looser about hardware and stricter about everything else: from 13 May 2013 any iPhone 4S or later could pull Friends Note off the App Store, and then it wanted an au ID before it would do anything. The app could travel; the account behind it stayed home. That is how a contacts product with an entirely ordinary feature list spent its whole life inside one carrier's customer base.

The code arrived from outside KDDI. Jibe Mobile, a Minato-ku company, was already shipping a standalone social address book called jibe, and the partnership KDDI announced on 26 September 2011 turned that app into au's. Existing jibe users got Friends Note as a software update. The fossil outlived the company name: the 2017 homepage still opened with a body tag whose id was jibe, while the meta keywords on the same page named automagi, which is what Jibe Mobile renamed itself on 1 March 2016 after the Jibe trademark went elsewhere.

It shipped from the middle of November 2011, free apart from packet charges, with the cloud half switched on at 15:00 on 26 January 2012. One thousand contacts was the storage ceiling, reported by Keitai Watch when the partnership was announced, and it is close to the only number this product ever produced.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ an address book with a feed in it ~

The social layer lived inside the address book rather than beside it. 統合タイムライン dropped a merged feed of your contacts' updates from other services straight into the app, so the place you went to call somebody was also the place you found out what they had posted. 交流履歴 ran the same idea backwards: open a contact and you got a single combined history of the calls between you and the messages that person had sent you on whichever services they had linked.

自動通知機能 is the one KDDI described at the most length. It pushed your current phone number and email address out to anybody who had you saved, automatically, along with which services you were on. The condition was mutual: the two of you had to have each other registered, and your own profile had to be set to public. The release spells the point out: because your friends' latest profile information is always displayed in your address book, your way of reaching them never breaks even if you never update it. An address book that repaired itself.

~ things you owned, in your contacts list ~

On 19 December 2011, a month after launch, KDDI bolted a shopping network onto the contacts list. Collection Note let you register items you owned and items you wanted, then show both lists to the friends in your address book and look through theirs. Recommendations came off the overlap, and a tap carried you to a shop to buy.

The roster of services Friends Note could link to dates the whole thing precisely. Twitter and Facebook you would expect, and mixi too. Underneath those came Skype, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Hatena Diary, Cocolog, Picasa, Gurunavi and Sekai Camera, which in 2011 was the augmented reality app a great many people expected to matter.

~ nobody put up a farewell ~

The app died on 28 August 2017 and its own website never mentioned it. A capture from 12 August, sixteen days out, shows a What's New column whose newest entry is dated September 2016 and whose only recent item is a maintenance notice for a window on 9 August. A capture from 26 September, a month after the app was gone, shows that same maintenance notice still sitting at the top. The site was left exactly where it stood.

A notice did exist, in the app store listings and on a KDDI media host, and it carried no reason. Friends Note does not appear on au's published list of ended services at all, and that register carries a dated row for almost everything else KDDI has switched off.

The strange part is that nothing was lost and nothing even moved. KDDI added the receiving feature to its データお預かり app in mid-August, around two weeks ahead of the shutdown, and the FAQ still live on a KDDI domain states the arrangement flatly: data entrusted to the Friends Note app sits on the same KDDI storage server as data entrusted to データお預かり. The backup half had already been handed across on 10 June 2015. What ended in August 2017 was the brand and the client that could open the file. The last pieces, a mass-notification mail function and a server-side address book you could read on a PC, kept running until 31 May 2022.

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