壁紙.com (Kabegami.com)

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

~ the obit ~

Changing the picture behind your icons was, for a few years around the turn of the century, close to the whole of what personalizing a computer meant. You could not reasonably change much else. So every language on the web grew its own wallpaper site, built out of a category tree and a download link, and most of them were gone by the time broadband arrived. This is the one that ran for twenty-three years.

Kabegami means wallpaper. The site is older than the company that ended up owning it. The oldest copy anybody kept is dated 6 December 2000, and Kabegami.com Inc. was folded into a GMO subsidiary by merger in March 2004. That subsidiary then renamed itself GMO Mobile and Desktop, which is an unusually literal piece of corporate naming, since mobile and desktop were precisely the two screens the acquisition had just bought pictures for. In May 2005 it became GMO Media, which listed on the Tokyo exchange in October 2015 and still trades.

What survived all of that renaming was a plain directory. The final version of the front page sorts its images under nature and landscape, food and drink, film and drama, celebrities, animals, sports, art and music. Below that sits a ranking of the most popular wallpapers next to a block of seasonal features for cherry blossom and Halloween. There is also a strip of trending keywords, which on the last archived day were running on a Victoria's Secret fashion show.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ from desktop to phone ~

The transition is visible in the furniture. By the end the site was no longer offering you a file to save into a folder. It was advertising a free Android application called WALL!, and the wallpapers were only downloadable if you installed it. The pitch for the app was specific about the problem it solved: with seven million images behind it, it could find you something similar to whatever you were looking at, and it would fit any picture to any screen size automatically.

That is a sentence about Android fragmentation dressed up as a feature, and it marks how far the product had traveled. A desktop wallpaper in 2000 was one of maybe four resolutions. A phone wallpaper in 2020 was whatever the handset happened to be, so the cropping had to be done for you.

~ seven million ~

Seven million is the figure the site itself used, written on the front page as over 7,000,000 images, free. It is worth being careful about what that number describes. Two decades of accumulation went into it, filed down into a taxonomy deep enough that the last page ever served carried a category for conifers and another for empty space in a composition.

~ the last thursday ~

GMO Media put the notice straight into the home page rather than on a page of its own, wedged between the app pitch and the popularity rankings. It opens with the usual formula thanking the reader for their custom over the years, states that the service would end as of Thursday 30 November 2023, and adds that the wallpaper feed inside the WALL! app would stop at the same time. Then it apologizes for the inconvenience.

The archive brackets it cleanly. On 27 November 2023, three days before the stated date, the crawler still got 14 KB of categories and rankings. The next capture, on 28 January 2024, is a 301 redirect of 551 bytes. The domain now answers behind a security filter that will not serve an ordinary request at all, and the company page it redirects to is 950 bytes of corporate tombstone. Two things died that Thursday, and only one of them wrote anything down. The site posted a farewell where its visitors would see it. The app just stopped having wallpapers in it.

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