Loctouch

~ the goodbye ~

Foursquare reached me. Loctouch structurally could not have, and the reason is built into what a check-in service is: it ran on livedoor accounts and on a database of Japanese venues, and a product whose whole value is the places within walking distance of you is a product that does not travel. Japan got its own, which is the normal outcome there and was the normal outcome in Korea and China too.

livedoor launched it on 15 July 2010, in the window when every company with a map and a user table was building one of these. The verb was the differentiator. You did not check in to a place, you touched it, and touching earned you stickers rather than the mayorships and badges that Foursquare had made the standard. It was free and social in the mild way these things were social, and it accumulated a venue database of the kind that is tedious to build and valuable once built.

Ownership moved underneath it without the product changing much. livedoor was absorbed into NHN Japan, which became LINE Corporation, and by 2013 the parent had found something far larger than a check-in app. LINE announced the closure on 31 March 2015 and gave the reason as selection and concentration of businesses. It closed at noon on 30 June 2015, fifteen days short of five years old.

~ the chronicle ~

~ touching things ~

The sticker idea was better than it sounds. Foursquare's mayorship was competitive and produced the behavior you would expect, people checking in from the parking lot to defend a title. Loctouch's stickers were collection rather than contest, closer to a stamp rally, which is a form Japanese travel culture already understood from railway stations and tourist sites. The product was borrowing a ritual that existed offline instead of inventing a game layer from scratch.

It spread outward the way these services did. There was Loctouch Gourmet for restaurant reviews and Loctouch Guide for travel, plus a site for developers building against the venue data. The store-facing side went first, closing in June 2013, which is usually the signal worth reading: when the paying side of a free consumer product shuts two years before the product does, the decision has already been made somewhere upstairs.

~ the shutdown letter ~

What LINE published alongside the closure notice was a migration guide, which is the detail that gives this grave its shape. Users were told how to take their data out and where to put it. The suggested destinations were livedoor Blog or Google Maps, which is to say: here is five years of everywhere you went, please paste it into a blog post or drop the pins into somebody else's map.

That is a reasonable thing for a company to do and most companies do not bother. It also quietly concedes what a check-in history actually was. Nobody logged those places to produce a dataset. People touched a ramen shop because they were in it, and the record was a byproduct that only meant anything inside the app that collected it. Exported to a spreadsheet of coordinates, a sticker is just a coordinate.

Loctouch's venue data outlived Loctouch, in the sense that it went on existing inside LINE and feeding things that were not Loctouch. The stickers did not. Nothing inherits a stamp rally.

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