Hatena RSS

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

~ the obit ~

Hatena RSS shipped as a beta on 9 May 2005 and died as a beta on 30 June 2010. Nothing in between removed the label. It was a web feed reader you logged into with a Hatena ID, it ran at r.hatena.ne.jp, and it did the things a 2005 feed reader did: you pasted in the blogs and news sites you read, and it collected the new items and stacked them where you could get at them from a browser or a keitai.

What made it a Hatena product rather than a generic reader was the wiring into everything else the company ran. You could import your Hatena Antenna list straight in. You could push an item you had just read into Hatena Bookmark without leaving the page. The keyword system that ran under Hatena Diary ran under the reader too, so you could subscribe to a word instead of a site and get back whatever the Japanese blogosphere had posted about it that day. On 2 February 2009 the front page was advertising five trending keywords. Four of them were entertainers. One of them was simply the word for "images".

On 3 February 2010, Internet Watch reported that Hatena would end it on 30 June. The reason the company gave was not cost and not traffic. Hatena said its development plan for the coming years pointed at other services and at new ones, that it had "no plan to develop Hatena RSS further," and that this made it hard to keep the quality at a level it was willing to stand behind. The number of people using it was not disclosed, then or ever. The last five months were declared a migration period, during which the reader kept working but crawling and update checks were maintained at the bare minimum.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ five years in beta ~

The beta badge was deliberate. Hatena shipped it in more than a dozen colors, sitting as a set of small GIFs in the reader's own image directory, a detail you only get from a company that treated permanent beta as a house style rather than an apology. Hatena Labs existed precisely so experiments could live somewhere without promising anything, and products got demoted into it when they stopped mattering.

The reader was never demoted. In June 2005, a month after launch, Hatena's director Naoya Ito told an Internet Watch event that the recently started RSS reader was growing nicely. By early 2009 it had modes for podcasts and for video, plus a view that laid your feeds out chronologically like a television listings grid. That is five years of real work on a product the company never promoted out of beta and then closed on the grounds that it had no further plans for it.

~ the three lifeboats ~

The closing notice named three places to go: Hatena Antenna, Google Reader and livedoor Reader. Google Reader closed on 1 July 2013, three years and a day after Hatena RSS. livedoor Reader lasted until 31 August 2017 under two more owners and a rename. Hatena Antenna, the oldest thing on the list and the one that was already elderly when it was offered as somewhere to go next, is the one still up.

There was collateral damage inside Hatena too. Hatena Ring, a blog-ring service that shared some of its plumbing with the reader, lost its antenna function on the same day. Ring had originally been scheduled to close in April 2008 and had been reprieved because nothing existed to replace it. Hatena said in February 2010 that the plan to end it had not changed but no date had been set. It was finally switched off on 1 October 2012.

~ the page that outlived the service ~

Go to r.hatena.ne.jp over plain HTTP in 2026 and it answers with the farewell page itself, intact: a thank-you note, the sentence confirming the service ended on 30 June 2010, the migration links, the warning about Hatena Ring, and a copyright line reading 2005 to 2010. The server header says AmazonS3 and the Last-Modified date is 12 January 2018, which is when somebody at Hatena moved a static file off a retiring machine and onto object storage rather than delete it.

That notice is now sixteen years old and two of the links on it go nowhere. It is still being served because deleting it was more effort than paying for it.

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