Hatena Haiku

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

~ the obituary ~

Microblogging had a fork in it around 2007 and almost everyone has forgotten there was a choice. Twitter decided that a post belongs to a person and that you subscribe to people. Hatena Haiku decided that a post belongs to a subject and that you subscribe to topics. One of those two answers went on to host the world's arguments for the next twenty years. The other closed in 2019 because it had become too expensive to keep switched on.

Haiku opened in December 2007 out of Hatena's Kyoto office and moved fast, close to ten thousand posts inside the first three days. The unit was the odai, the topic: a keyword with a page behind it, and whatever you wrote landed on that keyword's page alongside everyone else's. There was no meaningful character limit and pasting a URL got you the image or the video inline. There was also a drawing tool, so a keyword could fill up with sketches from people who had never spoken to each other.

I was not there for any of it, and the reason is not the language, which is the easy thing to reach for with any Japanese service. The reason is that by 2009 the microblog I actually opened was Twitter, and Twitter had already taught me to read a timeline as a list of people. Once you learn a shape you stop noticing it was ever a decision. Reading about Haiku now is mostly the experience of discovering that the shape I got used to was one of two on offer.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The practical effect of topic-first posting was that a joke could outlast the person who started it. On Twitter a running gag is held together by whoever keeps reposting it, and it dies when they get bored. On Haiku it was held together by a page, and the page did not care who turned up. New people found the keyword and added to it, and the thing accumulated for years without anybody owning it.

Hatena tried the idea twice. A mobile-focused rebuild called Hatena Haiku2 went into closed beta in November 2009 under a name the company always marked as provisional. It ran quietly for three years and closed on 1 October 2012, its archive pushed over into Hatena Coco. The original carried on running on its own code, which turned out to matter more than anyone expected.

~ the slide ~

The English version went first, in January 2015. Hatena had been running an English arm since roughly 2007 and it never found an audience outside Japan, which is not really a surprise. A service built entirely out of shared keywords needs a crowd dense enough that the keywords have somebody standing on them.

The Japanese side lasted four more years on a codebase that had been accumulating features since 2007. When Hatena finally announced the end it was unusually direct about why. The company said the service had grown a very particular internal structure over the years and that the cost of running it had climbed with it. Security was the other worry, and after roughly two years of trying to fix things, it admitted it had not managed a fundamental revival.

~ the day it died ~

The notice came on 19 November 2018 and the service ran until 27 March 2019, a four-month wind-down that Hatena spent working out how to let people export what they had written. The users spent it doing what users do, compiling lists of where to go next and discovering that nothing on the list had topics.

Hatena Diary closed four months after that, in July 2019. Two of the company's oldest properties went in the same year, and what survived was Hatena Bookmark and Hatena Blog, the pair with straightforward business logic underneath them. Haiku's problem was never that people disliked it. Its problem was that eleven years of a genuinely good idea had been built in a way nobody wanted to pay to maintain.

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