livedoor Clip

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

~ the eulogy ~

livedoor opened a social bookmarking service on the morning of 27 June 2006, with a staff blog post that called it a beta. It was still calling itself a beta six years later when it closed. You saved pages to it, tagged them, wrote a comment of up to 255 characters, and marked anything you wanted kept private. A watch list let you follow other members and read what they were saving.

Two details set it apart from the field. The first is that in 2007 it started pulling in comments from Hatena Bookmark and from Buzzurl through their own APIs, so you could read your two competitors' annotations on a page without leaving the page you were on. The second is the R18 flag, which warned that a page was not suitable for under-eighteens, and which only the very first person to bookmark that page was allowed to set. Everyone arriving afterward inherited the judgment of whoever got there first.

On 9 August 2012 a closing notice appeared, signed by someone identifying themselves only as 担当者Q. New registrations and new clips would stop on 10 September. Everything would stop at noon on 10 October. The notice apologizes and thanks you, and it gives no reason whatsoever. There is not even a 諸般の事情, the Japanese boilerplate that means circumstances and commits to nothing. A second post went up at 12:54 on the day itself to confirm it was done.

~ the dossier ~

~ dita and set ~

In January 2009 livedoor's experimental lab arm released the public half of its bookmark data to researchers, under the name EDGE Datasets. The press release, signed off by chief executive Takeshi Idezawa, who would later run LINE, claimed no commercial operator anywhere had opened data like this before, and argued the point that matters: until somebody did, no two research groups could run the same experiment against the same bookmark counts at the same moment.

Then somebody at livedoor decided the page needed a mascot, and an engineer suggested the tone should be tsundere. The illustrator refeia drew two girls in the style of a dating game, one with green hair and one with red. The green one is called ディタ and the red one is called セト, and you are supposed to say them together: dita-set, データセット, the loanword for data set. The page they stand on is headed, roughly, "if you have time to crawl, how about writing a paper instead", and the green one says the line that goes with the genre, which is that it is not as though she is worried about your paper or anything.

The research it produced was small but real. A 2011 paper in the Information Processing Society of Japan's journal, by Kazutaka Kurihara of AIST and Yohei Tutiya of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, used livedoor Clip as its large-scale case study for a statistical method aimed at long-tail distributions. The December 2008 extract they had to work with ran to about 1.57 million rows, and even that was filtered down to pages with at least three public clips that were at least three months old.

~ the dataset went first ~

EDGE Datasets stopped handing out data in August 2012, two months before the service that generated it. Its page stayed up another year with a tombstone on top, and that tombstone was written as a pastiche of a scene from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It starts by saying the data provision is apparently ending, then corrects itself in the voice of the character: you do not need to say apparently, say it has ended. By the time you think it is ending, it has already finished. It signs off with Bruno Bucciarati's farewell line, arrivederci, glossed in Japanese as goodbye.

The two girls outlasted both. Their GIFs are still being served today from livedoor Blog's content management system, because the pair were reused as mascots in the blogging admin screen and nobody ever took them down. The company that commissioned them is now LINE. Both the service that produced the data and the release that handed it out are gone, and two cartoon characters named after a CSV file are still sitting on a webserver.

~ where it sent you ~

The export was better than it had to be. You got your clips back as RSS 2.0 files carrying the URL, the title, the tags, the comment, the timestamp and the private flag, split across files at one megabyte each. If you closed your account before exporting, everything was deleted, and the notice says so plainly.

The two destinations it recommended were NAVER Matome, run by the same parent company, where everything you imported would be forced public, and Hatena Bookmark, which was the main competitor and which did support the private flag. Then it listed, in detail, exactly how Hatena would cut your data down: comments truncated from 255 characters to 100, URLs from 767 bytes to 255, tags from 30 characters to 32 bytes, and titles not carried across at all because Hatena held one shared title per URL for the whole service. A dying product does not usually sit down and write out a field-by-field account of how its rival will damage your archive.

~ the transparent png ~

One line near the end of the notice describes something that happened across thousands of Japanese blogs at the same instant. Every page on the Japanese web that displayed a little livedoor Clip badge, showing how many people had saved it, was fetching that number as an image from clip.livedoor.com. From 10 October those images were replaced with a transparent PNG, and every API call started returning empty. livedoor Blog's own clip buttons were removed automatically.

So the count did not go to zero and the badge did not break. It became invisible, in place, at noon, on every page that had ever installed it, and the layout closed up around the gap as though there had never been anything there.

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