melma!blog

» see blog.melma.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

CyberAgent had been running a mail-magazine stand called melma! since April 2000, and in December 2003 it bolted a blog onto the side of it. One account would do both jobs, sending an issue out to subscribers and keeping a page anybody could read. Trial operation was announced on 19 December for a start on the 25th, free to use, built on a customized copy of Hatena Diary. The front page claimed that doing the two at once was something only melma! could offer.

It lasted one year and eleven months. On 21 October 2005 the company posted a notice saying the service would end on 30 November, and that melma! would be concentrating from then on what it had always really been, a place to send mail magazines from. Posting stayed open to the last day. The final capture of the front page carries entries stamped 10:45 on 30 November, and by the next morning the whole site was one line of past tense.

The third section of that notice is the part worth reading. Registration details would be erased and destroyed by the company, and so would the entries and the comments underneath them. Then a sentence that leaves nothing to interpret: 「消去後のデータは復旧できませんので、予めご了承ください」. Once erased the data cannot be restored, so please accept this in advance.

A mail-magazine stand is a Japanese format with no real counterpart in the web I was reading in 2003. A product whose entire selling point was handling magazines and blogs from one login only makes sense in a market where the magazine half was already an industry with millions of subscribers and a vocabulary of its own.

~ the case file ~

~ what you got instead of an export ~

Impress reported in its shutdown piece that a migration path from melma!blog into Ameba Blog had in fact been considered, and was dropped because of what it would cost to build the system. CyberAgent owned both services. It priced the bridge between them and decided against building it, then deleted one side.

What the notice offered instead was a campaign. Open a new Ameba Blog account, it said, and five people drawn at random would receive an iPod nano. It also mentioned that Ameba had just passed 500,000 bloggers, which reads less like consolation and more like an explanation. For anyone who wanted to keep writing somewhere else, the advice was 「他社様のブログサービスをご利用いただけますようお願い致します」. Please use another company's blog service.

~ the five who were carried ~

Five official blogs did get moved. The notice names them one by one, and by the time the page was archived the following year their new addresses on ameblo.jp had been filled in underneath. The move was scheduled for the middle of November, two weeks before everyone else's writing was erased.

~ the stand outlived the blog ~

melma! itself went on for years. CyberAgent sold it to Unity Inc. with effect from 1 May 2010, personal data and all, and the new owner kept the magazines going for another decade. The end there was muddled too: one 2020 notice put the stop at the end of January with the data deleted on 2 March, and the live tombstone gives 13 March.

The blog ran for twenty-three months and its address stopped resolving. The stand it was bolted to ran for nearly twenty years and still answers, with a 410 and one sentence.

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