ImaHima

» see imahima.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

imahima sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it was a japanese mobile carrier product from 1999, running on i-mode handsets across ntt docomo and later kddi and softbank, in a market that did not look like anything else in the world at the time. japan was on packet-switched mobile internet years before the rest of us, with paid micropayment billing through the carrier, with color screens and emoji baked into the protocol. imahima used all of it.

the founder, neeraj jhanji, started the company in tokyo around 1999 and named it after the japanese phrase 'ima hima', meaning 'are you free now'. the product was small. you opened it on your handset, set your status, your mood and where you were, and a list of friends could see it. they could ping back. you could see where they were. back then. that simple loop is the entire pattern of every location-based social network that came after.

the service grew to over five hundred thousand users at peak, mostly inside japan, with smaller deployments in switzerland and australia. it won a prix ars electronica in 2001, which in the electronic-arts world of that period was about as serious a recognition as a piece of mobile software could get. dodgeball, brightkite, loopt and foursquare were all years away. twitter was years away. facebook places was almost a decade away.

i was in ankara on a 56k modem in 1999. i did not own a japanese handset. i could not have used imahima even if i had heard of it, the service was bound to japanese carrier sims by the protocol itself. by the time location-based social networking made it to phones i could buy, it was called foursquare and the people who built it had never heard of imahima.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the technical pattern was carrier-integrated from the start. imahima ran inside the i-mode and ezweb and softbank menus, billed through the carrier per-message or per-subscription. that was the only way to ship a mobile service in japan during this window. the carriers controlled what software the handset could see, and you paid the carrier, not the developer. imahima negotiated its way in. it sat one or two taps deep on the menu of millions of japanese phones.

i saw this pattern from a distance much later, in retrospectives about why japanese mobile was both years ahead and a dead end. really though. the rest of the world skipped the walled-garden carrier era and went straight to wifi-and-app-store smartphones. japan's i-mode model evolved into garapagos handsets and then collapsed when the iphone arrived. imahima's whole substrate disappeared.

~ the long tail ~

the founders shut the company down in 2006 after a major server outage and what jhanji later described as accumulated pressure from the carriers about features and monetization. the official end was quiet. the wikipedia entry is two paragraphs. there was no press cycle, no twitter farewell post, because twitter was nine months old and imahima users were not on it.

the unusual footnote is the patents. facebook acquired the imahima patent family in 2013, which covered mobile status broadcasting, location-tagged check-ins and location-based advertising. by then facebook places and instagram geotags had been live for years and were being challenged on prior art. the imahima patents from 1999 to 2002 were prior art that facebook chose to own rather than fight. the only legible trace imahima left on the modern social internet is sitting in a portfolio at meta, attached to features the founders never got to ship at scale.

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