Hatena World

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

~ the last words ~

Hatena opened a hundred closed-beta slots for Hatena World on 13 December 2007. They were taken in sixty-seven minutes. Five more waves over the following four days put six hundred and fifteen people inside, the doors came off entirely on the seventeenth, went straight back on the same day when Flash Player started misbehaving, and came off again properly on the eighteenth. A week after launch there were around four thousand people in there, which is both a respectable number and, for a map of the entire Earth, nobody at all.

ITmedia's headline asked whether this was Hatena's Second Life, which in December 2007 was the comparison everybody reached for. Hatena's president said the first thing he wanted it to replace was instant messaging, and then added the real reason anyone builds this: walking around a three-dimensional space is simply more fun than not doing so.

Your avatar was a flat cutout you drew yourself, standing on a Google map of the real world. It started life on the street outside Hatena's own office in Shibuya, so the default view of a planet-sized surface was one block of Tokyo. The whole thing ran in Flash in a browser tab, in Japanese and English at the same time, and there was nothing to install.

~ the record ~

~ the blue circle ~

The part worth remembering is how it handled who could hear you. Under every avatar sat a blue circle on the ground, and that circle was the conversation. People standing inside it received what you typed and people outside it did not, and you could drag the edge to make your audience larger or smaller. There was no room to join and no channel to pick. You walked until you were near somebody, and proximity did the rest.

When a conversation finished, the log did not vanish. It fell to the ground where the talking had happened and sat there as an icon, and anybody who came past later could open it and read the whole exchange as a plain page. A street in Shibuya accumulated the transcripts of whatever had been said while standing on it, which is a strange and rather beautiful property for a chat system to have, and one that nobody has gone back for since.

The map also carried the thing Hatena always carried, which was keywords, printed in grey text across the surface. From 6 January 2008 you were allowed to draw pictures on them.

~ filed under experiments ~

On 10 June 2008, a hundred and eighty days after launch, Hatena filed the service under Hatelabo, the experiments wing, and said why in one unusually direct sentence: it had been released as a proper Hatena service and the company had tried to grow it, the scale had not come anywhere near expectations, and development effort was needed on the main products instead. This is the second Hatena product in this archive to take that exact route out of the catalog, and Rimo made the same trip four and a half months earlier.

The obituary Hatena wrote two years later is the part that stings. Since the move, it said, no particular maintenance had been carried out, so by 2010 even the basic functions no longer worked properly. The service was reachable the entire time. It simply stood there in Shibuya decaying in public for two years while the company got on with other things.

~ one month's notice ~

The warning went up at ten past one in the afternoon on 18 May 2010 and gave a month exactly. Hatena was also explicit that no export tool was coming, which closed the question of what happened to the drawings and the ground-level conversation logs. The service ended on Friday 18 June 2010, and the company posted a short confirmation the same day.

Go to w.hatena.ne.jp in 2026 and something still answers: a small static notice saying that Hatena World, where you could enjoy conversation on a map, ended service on 18 June 2010. The link it offers for further details points at a Hatena Diary address that itself stopped existing years ago.

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