Vector maglog

» see maglog.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Vector is the software download site, the Japanese one, the place you ended up when you were hunting for a small Windows utility and the trail led through pages you could not read. I hit it more than once in my shareware years, on dial-up and later on TTNet broadband, and I never learned a word of the interface. You recognize a download mirror by its layout before you recognize its language. It has been running since the early 1990s and it still runs. In 2006 it decided to become a blog host, and the thing it built was stranger than the category suggests.

Closed testing began on 1 June 2006 under the name MicMac maglog, a companion service for an MMORPG called MicMac Online, which is a modest way to start a publishing platform. Open beta followed on 24 October 2006 as Vector maglog. A free account came with 500MB of space and the ability to upload files up to 60MB each, including ZIP archives, which is a detail that tells you who Vector thought its users were. Everyone else's blog host let you attach a photo. This one let you ship a build.

maglog was Japanese only and had no English presence at all, which is part of why almost nothing was written about it outside Japan. It ran for five and a half years and solved a problem in 2007 that the English-speaking web spent another decade treating as open.

~ the case file ~

~ what you could sell ~

The paid tier opened on 27 March 2007. From then on a maglog blog could be made members-only, or it could charge money at the door. You could send a mail magazine to your subscribers and only to them. Surveys came built in. You could also sell commercial software straight off your own pages, which for a site owned by a software distributor was closer to the day job than to a new feature.

Video could be uploaded for streaming playback, which in 2007 was not a given on a blog host. Later releases added a WYSIWYG editor, support for Japanese mobile phone emoji, and a rebuilt admin page. Substack, founded in 2017 and widely described at the time as a new idea, ships a membership wall and a way to charge the people behind it. maglog had both running in Japanese by 2008, on a domain most of its own users had first reached while looking for a file compressor.

~ what came after ~

All services ended on 17 May 2012. The notice went up months ahead with a list of which functions would stop on which date, and somebody wrote a migration tool called Maguro-kun to pull maglog posts out and into a normal blog. It is still sitting in Vector's own software library, filed under networking utilities, where the shutdown of a Vector service ends up as one more download.

The company kept going. Its free homepage hosting, hp.vector, outlived maglog by twelve years and closed on 20 December 2024, and when that happened Japanese coverage used the line that always comes out for these, that another valuable archive was being lost. Vector still sells software. The thing it built in 2006, where a Japanese writer could lock a post and charge for the key, closed without anyone outside Japan noticing it had been there.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »