Hatena Map

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

~ the obituary ~

Most dead websites leave a notice that explains nothing. Hatena Map left one that explained too much. The page that stood at map.hatena.ne.jp through the spring of 2008 said that the service had taken up the Google Maps API early and had let people put Hatena's photos and keywords onto a map, and that a version upgrade on Google's side meant the thing had finished its role. Companies do not usually write that down. Hatena wrote it down and then closed on 31 March 2008.

It had opened as a beta on 7 July 2005, eight days after Google first let anyone outside the company use its maps, and went to full service on 6 December that year alongside Hatena Graph. What it did was plot Hatena against itself. Every keyword in Hatena Diary that had been given a location turned into a point. Photos from Hatena Fotolife landed where they were taken. The map was not a map of the world so much as a map of one website, which in 2005 was a new idea about what a map was for.

The 2005 mashup wave was the first time the web felt like it had a shared toolkit. The API reached everywhere, including a computer science department in Turkey, and for about a year every developer I knew had an opinion about what they would put on a map if they had the time. The services built on top of it mostly did not travel. Hatena Map stayed in Japanese and stayed inside Hatena, so you needed a Hatena Diary before the map was worth anything to you.

~ the case file ~

~ the wrapper ~

A wrapper has a specific lifespan. You build it because a platform gives you a primitive and withholds the convenience, and you live in the gap between the two. Hatena Map lived in the gap where Google supplied tiles and markers but no way for an ordinary person to save a set of places. Hatena filled that in with its own content and its own accounts, and for two years that was a real product.

Google closed the gap in 2007 with My Maps, which let anyone drop pins and annotate them under their own login. Hatena's notice does not name the feature, but it points at the version upgrade and draws the obvious conclusion. The announcement on 29 February 2008 covered Hatena Ring in the same breath and said the company would concentrate on its main and newer services.

~ the exit data ~

The ending is the part worth keeping. Hatena did not simply switch the service off. It exported everything the map had held, all the geotagged Hatena Diary keywords and all the trackbacks that had been registered, and published them as KML and KMZ files on the tombstone page. KML is Google's format. The instructions underneath told you how to open the files in Google Earth and how to paste the URL straight into the Google Maps search box.

Hatena promised to host those files indefinitely. So a Japanese company shut down its map because Google's map had gotten good enough, and then wrote a short manual explaining how to carry the dead service's contents into the product that had made it unnecessary. The company handed the winner the files and the directions at the same time.

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