Hatena Land

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

~ the eulogy ~

Hatena Land opened on 1 October 2010 as a social network for Japanese elementary and junior high school students. You made an avatar, called a Happy, and you talked to the people on your friends list inside a virtual space. Entry was by invitation from an existing user only, which was the safety design: a closed membership growing from people who already knew each other. It ran in a browser, including the browser on a Nintendo DSi, which is how a service for children reaches children in Japan in 2010.

On 8 October, one week in, Hatena posted a notice saying the service would be unavailable until the 19th. The stated purpose was work toward a version that could be enjoyed more safely. It never reopened. On 15 October the company announced an indefinite termination, saying it would review the content from the ground up and consider offering it again as a different service. The reason it gave was that it wanted to run something children could enjoy safely and that guardians could recommend to them with confidence.

What the press reported was more specific than what Hatena said. Users of Ugomemo Theater, the Nintendo DSi side of Hatena's animation-sharing service, could register for Hatena Land without an invitation at all. Adults came in through that gap in volume, and the measures against them lagged behind. The invitation wall was the entire safety model, and it had a door in it from the first day.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hole in the invitations ~

The gap deserves a moment, because it was deliberate. Hatena's DSi animation service had a very large installed base of users who were already verified against a Hatena account, and treating them as pre-invited is a reasonable engineering decision right up until you remember who else was on that platform. Flipnote Hatena's audience was mostly children, and it was not only children. The invitation system could check whether you held an account, and it had no way to check how old you were.

Hatena shipped on 1 October and pulled the plug seven days later, before anyone could write the story it was trying to avoid. The company did not wait for an incident, and no incident has ever been reported. What it had instead was an inflow it could not screen, against a product whose whole promise was that the screening had already happened.

~ the week it was open ~

Nobody published how many children signed up, and Hatena has not said since. The termination notice dealt with the two things that could be made good. Users who had spent Hatena Points or Color Stars on items got all of it returned. Users whose only Hatena service was Hatena Land had their friend data deleted outright, and the friend links between them were dissolved, because the only place those relationships had ever existed was a service that no longer did.

A Japanese-language service for Japanese schoolchildren, gated behind a Hatena account and reached through a Nintendo handheld, is about as narrow an audience as a product can pick, and it never had a week in which anyone outside that audience could have joined it. What makes it worth a gravestone is the shape. An invitation-only space is only as closed as its smallest exception, and Hatena found that out in a week.

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