Hatena Coco

» see coco.hatena.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The check-in is the one dead product category of the smartphone era that nobody misses, and every country had its own. Foursquare and Gowalla took the English-speaking web, with Google coming at it from the operating system. Japan had Hatena Coco, released on 12 April 2010 and closed on 1 July 2014. It is the same four-year window the whole category occupied, on roughly the same schedule, in markets that shared almost no users.

Coco was a mobile service for sharing the places you had actually gone. You logged a location, and whoever you had allowed could see it. The scope control was the interesting part: a post could go to your friends or to the open web, and the choice was made per post rather than once in a settings screen. It ran on your Hatena ID, so your location history sat next to your bookmarks and your diary under one account.

Hatena wired it into mixi Check, the share button of Japan's then-dominant social network, in the same rollout that connected Hatena Bookmark and Hatena Diary. That is as close to the center of the Japanese web as Coco ever got, and it got there as the third name on a list.

~ the case file ~

~ imakoko ~

The function was called imakoko, which is Japanese for "here, now", and it published your current position. The name is better than anything Foursquare came up with because it describes the entire emotional content of a check-in without pretending there is more. You are somewhere and you would like someone to know. No mayorship and no badge, just the two words that are actually true.

Hatena built it as the company built everything in that period, as a small thing attached to an identity people already had, and the limitation was the same one every Hatena side service ran into: the audience was people who already held a Hatena account and were already in Japan.

~ the three-service notice ~

On 12 May 2014 Hatena announced that three services would close on 1 July. Coco was one. The other two were Hatena Monolith, which read a product barcode and posted it to the web with your comment attached, and Hatena Album, a shared photo album service launched only two years earlier in May 2012. Three products about recording ordinary life, switched off together, with seven weeks of notice.

A service dying alone usually means it failed. Three dying on one date means somebody did arithmetic on a portfolio, and Coco's number came up in a spreadsheet. Nobody at Hatena had to settle the question of whether people still wanted to tell each other where they were. By July 2014 they mostly did not, and the companies that had bet everything on the check-in were already gone. Being a side project at a company earning its money elsewhere is why Coco got four years instead of two.

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