Hatena Group

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

~ the eulogy ~

Hatena Group was groupware, which is a dull word for what it actually did. It opened as a beta on 23 April 2004, announced as an extension of Hatena Diary rather than as a product of its own, and the thing it extended was the one mechanic Hatena had that nobody else did. A group got its own keyword space. Members could register and edit keywords that existed only inside that group, so a working team or a hobby club could build a private dictionary of its own vocabulary, with the auto-linking working against that dictionary instead of the public one.

Around that sat the rest of the kit, added over the years: a blog, a scheduler, a message board, task tracking, file sharing. Posts could be set to public mode, visible to anyone, or private mode, visible only to members. The text went through in UTF-8, which made it usable in languages beyond Japanese and English, not a given in 2004. At launch you could not read it on a phone at all. A presentation mode arrived in September 2006.

Hatena announced in July 2019 that it intended to close the service before 2019 was out, followed up in September, published export instructions in November, and on 9 December 2019 named the actual date. Hatena Group stopped accepting reads and writes on Friday 31 January 2020, fifteen years and nine months after the beta opened.

~ the dossier ~

~ the group dictionary ~

Hatena's public keyword dictionary is the thing the company is remembered for, and Hatena Diary is where that story belongs. What Hatena Group did with it was narrower and stranger. The value of an auto-linking dictionary scales with how much shared vocabulary its readers have, and the public dictionary was tuned for the whole Japanese web, which means it was tuned for nobody in particular. A twelve-person group with its own jargon is exactly the size where the mechanic actually pays off: every internal term becomes a page and every mention of it becomes a link, so a reference builds up as a side effect of people posting normally.

The other use was more mundane and probably more common. Hatena Diary forbade holding several IDs against one email address, so people who wanted a second diary for a different subject used a group as the place to put it. A groupware product sold on collaboration spent a good share of its life as overflow space for individuals.

~ fifteen years of free ~

The fee schedule was not quietly dropped. It was published, in detail, in the launch coverage: 800 yen a month for up to five users, rising to 6,400 for a hundred, payable in Hatena Points, with the beta free until 20 May 2004. On 7 May, thirteen days before the official version was due, Hatena announced that the basic service would be provided with the fee kept at zero. The company had planned to charge after the beta and abandoned the plan before the beta ended.

What was left of the business model was options. Bigger image uploads, HTTPS, controls over outbound trackbacks, and a license under discussion that would let a company use an entire group commercially. Fifteen years later the service closed without anyone having published what any of that earned.

~ the four notices ~

The shutdown was unusually well documented for a product this quiet. Four separate announcements ran from July 2019 to December 2019, and the last of them, the one that fixed 31 January as the date, later had a line appended confirming that the service had in fact ended as announced. The same post carries a June 2020 addendum noting that export files had been emailed out on 28 February 2020, a month after the lights went off, under a subject line that began with the words "export data attached". Go to g.hatena.ne.jp today and the host still redirects into that announcement.

Japanese Wikipedia's entry on Hatena's service roster dates the closure to 2019, which is the year Hatena originally aimed at. The four notices are the record of how it slipped: the plan was the end of 2019 and the execution landed a month into 2020. Hatena's own announcement blog carries 467 posts filed under Hatena Group, and the last one tells you that somebody kept the export pipeline running for four weeks after the service it served had closed.

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