LINE BLOG

» see lineblog.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

LINE never became a Turkish habit. The messenger that mattered here went from MSN to WhatsApp with nothing in between, and LINE stayed a name I read in coverage of the Japanese market rather than something I ever installed. A blogging platform bolted onto a messenger I did not have, written in a language I cannot read, is about as far outside my orbit as a service gets while still being on the same internet.

It opened on 4 November 2014 under the name LINE Official Blog, and the whole point at launch was that it was not for you. LINE recruited celebrities in waves through 2014 and 2015, mostly musicians and television personalities. GReeeeN and Shoko Nakagawa were among the early ones, and the retired tennis player Kimiko Date Krumm was in there too. The name shortened to LINE BLOG in December of that first year.

General users were let in during November 2016. Anyone with a LINE account could open a blog, which meant the platform had spent two years building an audience before it asked that audience to write anything. That is the correct order if you can afford to wait, and LINE could, because the messenger underneath it was already installed on most phones in Japan.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Japanese celebrity blogging is a real industry rather than a hobby, and it was already occupied. Ameba had been running it since 2004 and had the biggest names locked in. LINE's argument was distribution: a post could land in the same app where the reader was already talking to friends, with no separate account and no separate app to open.

For a few years that worked well enough. The service stayed Japanese-only for its entire life, which is not a failure so much as a decision, and it kept its shape as a place where a musician posted photographs from a tour rather than a place where strangers argued.

~ the funny part ~

LINE announced the shutdown on 30 January 2023, citing changes in the market and a need to concentrate its resources. Posting was frozen on 30 March and everything went read-only. The site was switched off at two in the afternoon on 29 June 2023.

The migration tools pointed at two destinations. One was Ameba, the competitor LINE had spent nine years failing to displace. The other was Livedoor Blog, which LINE Corporation had operated since 2012 and had sold to Minkabu on 28 December 2022, five weeks before it announced that LINE BLOG was closing. So the company told its writers to move to a platform it had run for a decade and had just finished getting rid of.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nine years of Japanese celebrity posting, most of which had exactly one home. The migration tool moved what people chose to move in a three month window, and a migration tool is only ever used by the fraction of an audience still paying attention when the notice goes up.

LINE Corporation itself became LY Corporation on 1 October 2023, three months after the site went dark. The parent company's own name lasted about ninety days longer than the blog did, which is a short enough gap that the shutdown reads less like a product decision and more like tidying up before a merger.

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