GREE (PC)

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

~ the goodbye ~

gree launched on 21 february 2004, at the same time mixi was opening its beta about two months later. both were friends-of-friends japanese social networks aimed at university students and early tech adopters. gree was built by yoshikazu tanaka as a side project while he was working at rakuten. the name was a shortening of six degrees, a reference to the milgram experiment. by the end of 2004 tanaka had left rakuten to run gree full time.

japan's sns landscape in the mid 2000s did not look like the rest of the world. it was mostly closed and invite-only, split between mixi and gree with a long tail of smaller sites. facebook did not have a japanese-language version until 2008 and did not get real traction until 2010 or later. gree and mixi had a five-year runway to lock in the market before facebook arrived. they used it, and the market they built was strong enough that facebook never fully broke through in japan the way it broke through everywhere else.

none of this reached turkey. the japanese social network landscape was invisible from ankara. i was on msn messenger and turkish forums like donanimhaber through 2004 to 2010, my model of a japanese social network was mixi from tech blog reading. gree registered as a name but not a place. the whole feature-phone social gaming culture that made gree's later fortune was japan-only for years, tied to how japanese carriers billed and how i-mode had trained a whole generation to pay small amounts for mobile content.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the mobile pivot ~

in 2007 gree launched a mobile version, and it turned out that the japanese feature-phone market wanted social games more than it wanted a mobile facebook. the mobile-web games gree published (dancing girl crinoppe, fishing star, tsuri suta, gree crinoppe) became the actual business. by 2010 or so, over 90 percent of gree's active users were on mobile, and gree had reshaped itself from a general sns into a mobile gaming platform with a social layer bolted to the side.

gree ipoed in 2008 and became for a short window the youngest ceo of a listed japanese company: yoshikazu tanaka was in his early thirties. the company got aggressive about the western market in 2010 and 2011, acquired ngmoco for four hundred million dollars, and launched mobage west's competitor mobile-social platform. that western play did not work, but the japanese business kept running.

~ what really happened ~

the pc web version of gree kept running through the whole mobile pivot, mostly as a legacy surface for people who had started on it in the 2000s. by 2020 gree was announcing that the pc social features would be shut off and users would need to move to the smartphone app for anything besides read-only access. the announced deadline was 24 june 2021, at 15:00 jst.

on that day the pc gree stopped serving the sns portions of the site: no more diaries, no more communities, no more photo sharing, no more friend-of-friend browsing on desktop. the domain kept resolving for the mobile game portals. seventeen years and four months after tanaka had put up the first version. gree the company is still operating in 2026, still primarily a mobile gaming holding structure. gree the pc social network is gone.

~ what got buried ~

what got buried was the era where japanese sns was a distinct thing from western sns. mixi and gree were the two japanese-language products that told you what a non-facebook social internet could have looked like: less broadcast-shaped and more built around small closed circles that were mobile-first from very early. the closed model held against facebook in japan for a decade. it did not hold against the smartphone shift, which killed the pc web as the anchor of any social network anywhere.

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