Keijibanteki Kotoba Uchu (掲示板的コトバ宇宙)

~ the obit ~

In 1998 three Waseda University students who had met running the websites of different campus clubs found themselves with nothing to do, because the school festival they were supposed to be working on had been cancelled. They decided to build a deliberately uncool internet service before they graduated. The name they landed on translates roughly as bulletin-board-style word universe, and everybody shortened it to the two characters in brackets at the end, "-宙".

The complaint they were answering was specific. Japanese community sites at the time were pet-raising boards in the PostPet mold or virtual islands you moved onto, and to these three that was just daily life with a skin on it. So the premise became one universe handed to each user. You registered, you were called a space person, and you received a universe containing stars. Each star was a message board.

It launched in April 1999, the same month the three of them graduated. They had assumed a thousand users would be plenty. Five thousand registered inside the first month and the count kept climbing by about three hundred a day, which broke the server almost immediately and started a sequence of moves onto whatever hardware a friend of a friend could offer.

There were no banner ads. Income was zero. The bubble was at its loudest and several companies came around to talk about working together, and every one of them left as soon as it became clear that nothing in the design turned users into revenue.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how a universe worked ~

Stars belonged to wards identified by two to four digits. One day in every ten a star entered a state called eclipse and could not be written to, which star depending on the last digit of its ward. That began as a crude way of shedding server load and became a feature people planned around. Stars also grew: post counts and visitor counts unlocked abilities and changed the background and the icons, so an active board looked visibly different from a quiet one.

Timestamps were printed in something called CST, where an earth date of year-month-day-hour-minute was rearranged into month-day as the year, hour as the month, minute as the day, prefixed with a single katakana character that rotated annually through the zodiac initials starting from the rabbit in 1999. A bot named for the old frontier guards sat permanently in the boards, posting things calculated to annoy the owner and turning up uninvited on the owner's friends' boards. An owner could switch on a mode that rewrote their board's punctuation into Dejiko's verbal tic from Di Gi Charat. Every one of these was an excuse to make people talk to each other, and they worked.

~ the prize and the sale ~

At the end of July 2000 Waseda's own Institute for Network Society research ran a net-venture contest, and "-宙" took the grand prize out of a hundred and forty entries. By then the user count had reached eighty thousand, the team had grown from three to six, and all of it was still unpaid labor. A prize does not pay for a server. That autumn they agreed to sell to Rakuten.

Rakuten folded it into Infoseek, where it reached a peak of about 170,000 registered users. That number is the whole argument for selling: the thing kept growing after it stopped being a student project, and it needed someone with machines. Turkish forum culture in exactly these years ran on the same shape from the other end, boards you could rent or be given, signatures you filled with your hardware list, a small crew holding the hosting together. What Japan had that Turkey did not was a portal company big enough to absorb the good ones.

~ february ~

In February 2006 something went wrong with the servers. Late that month Infoseek stopped the service for emergency maintenance and said it would be back. It was not. On 5 April 2006 Rakuten announced that recovery had been abandoned, and on 3 July the service was formally ended.

Seven years of boards went with it. There is no export, no archive dump, no successor product that inherited the accounts. A fault nobody could fix is a rarer cause of death than a business decision, and it is worse, because the people who ran it did not choose anything and the users never got a last day to post on.

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