magnet

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

~ the goodbye ~

NTT Data and Sanrio opened this thing together in November 1996, which is early enough that the word for it had to be invented later. The stated goal was Sanrio's. Put schools and households on the internet alongside companies. Then give children a place to gather with their parents. NTT Data built the systems. Sanrio did the design, reusing what it had learned making its own character pages. The target age was 2 to 15. The name stood for multi-activity get-together network, and Sanrio president Shintaro Tsuji said he chose it because NTT gives you an N and Sanrio gives you an S, which is what a magnet has.

Every explanatory sentence on the site was written in hiragana and katakana with only the kanji a child in the lower elementary grades could read, and that rule held even on the pages about copyright and netiquette. Web of the Year put it second in the 1999 children and family category. In the June 1999 issue of the magazine Shogaku Rokunensei, the elementary-school panel voted it the homepage they looked at most, and the magazine said the reason was that you could chat on it without any trouble.

I was 12 when it opened. That is inside the target range and about as far outside the product as a person can get. This was in Japanese, for Japanese children on Japanese dial-up. In 1996 I was still two years away from owning a modem of my own. What makes it worth writing up has nothing to do with nostalgia. It is that a telco and a toy company built a working social network with user profiles and private messaging in 1997, and then took it apart.

~ the chronicle ~

~ magnetown ~

Registration arrived in July 1997 and turned a set of web pages into something recognizable. You picked a nickname, which you could never change. The system issued you a Magnetts Number of three letters plus four digits, where the last digit identified which member of your family you were. Early on you did not even need an email address: they would post the number to you on a postcard. Members were called Magnetts. The administrators were the magnet office, and the magnet office was a room inside the NTT Data Toyosu Center Building in Koto ward, Tokyo.

Your account got a house in a place called Magnetown. The house page showed your profile and a counter labeled as the number of times the owner had come home. There was a bicycle icon next to the house for wandering off through the other towns and planets, and a character holding binoculars for Magnesearch, which was a user search. A mailbox icon opened Magpost, a message system that made you pick an illustrated template and ran a filter that refused to send anything containing personal information or an unpleasant word.

Then there was the garbage. Stay away and trash accumulated outside your house, and if you left it long enough the trash rotted. NTT Data marketed this openly as a discipline mechanism, useful for raising children. One click cleared it, however much had built up. Stay away for eighty days and the house was demolished and the plot went back to being empty, and with no house you lost your public profile and your access to Magpost. That gave the operators a clean definition of an active user, and it is why the numbers come in pairs: 250,000 registered members in September 2000, of whom about 60,000 held a house.

~ 315 yen a month ~

There was a paid tier called Super Magnetts, and after July 2002 it cost 315 yen to register plus 315 yen a month for a whole family. The earlier price had been 700 yen to register plus 200 yen a month. You got members-only content and a physical membership card. Original magnet merchandise came with it, different every year: keychain lights one season, wristwatches the next. You also got discounts on tickets to Sanrio Puroland and Harmonyland. From the summer of 2003 a Super Magnett received an email address on magnet.ne.jp and webmail to read it with.

Full paid membership had been considered at the start and rejected. In February 1998 the operators settled on keeping registration free and running the site as a commercial business funded by advertising from companies, which is roughly the decision every consumer web property made that year. The membership figures kept moving, 310,000 by January 2001 and a final count of 420,000 announced in May 2005. Half the members were 15 or under, but there was no age limit, so the parents were in there too. The gender split ran 3 to 7, male to female.

~ the chat problem ~

The chat was the most popular feature and the one that broke. It began as a Java applet in 1997 and was rebuilt in Shockwave in 1999. Anyone could open a room in the area called the plaza and pick whatever avatar they wanted. Trolling and abusive messages became constant. Complaints buried the magnet office, and the chat was closed for over a month.

What came back on 1 August 2002 was a different product. Only Super Magnetts could create rooms. Free members were left with a handful of avatars that included a banana peel and the magnet logo itself, and almost none of the Sanrio characters. A reporting button was added, checked against an unpublished word list. It showed the user a warning and wrote the incident to the office's server. Everything people say now about moderating a children's platform, a Japanese telco had already learned by 2002 and written into the interface.

~ the second magnet ~

The chat shut on 28 February 2005 and the rest of old magnet followed on 21 March. The plan was to reopen at the end of that month. It slipped, and the new version arrived on 31 May 2005. It was not a community site any more. It was a blog host, one blog per account, presented to the child as being handed the key to a house, and you had to be an elementary or middle school student to register, verified by asking. The account name became a subdomain of magnet.ne.jp, which restricted names to alphanumerics. By August 2006 it had 17,000 members and nine out of ten were girls.

There was no paid tier this time, and the reason given was that the whole thing now ran as a corporate social responsibility project: NTT Data and Sanrio contributing what each was good at toward a healthier internet for children. The operating idea was to raise the problems a child would meet online and get the members arguing about them, so that netiquette got learned by publishing something for real. On 29 March 2007 the office announced that it had reviewed the results so far and considered repeatedly how to provide a better service, and that the service would end. It ended on 30 June 2007, and from the next day you could neither post nor read.

The site itself stayed up until 2010, holding four things. The closure notice. A page of goodbye messages from the Magfriends characters. Then a netiquette quiz next to a netiquette certification test. A children's community that spent eleven years teaching kids how to behave online left the exam behind and took the town away.

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