みなくる

» see mina-kuru.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Shizuoka sits between Tokyo and Nagoya, and Big Tokai was the company that sold the people there their cable television and their internet access. On 28 November 2005 it also started a social network. The name みなくる was squeezed out of the phrase 皆が来るサイト, a site everyone comes to, which is what a telecoms company reaches for when it wants a product to sound like a neighborhood rather than a product.

What opened that day was みなくるホーム, and the feature list is the standard Japanese one for the period. You got an avatar you dressed from an item shop, a My Room you could redecorate, a diary with three visibility settings, photo albums, and up to six bulletin boards of your own, any of which could be locked behind a password. Visitors left 足跡, footprints, which the site kept for a month and then forgot. Premium membership cost 315 yen a month and the main thing it bought you was a tool that wrote the HTML into your diary on your behalf.

By the end of February 2007 there were 125,000 members, which for a provincial ISP's side project is a real number. Big Tokai kept building. みなくるペットバンザイ, a dog site, had arrived two days after launch. みなくるSTAGE opened in April 2006 for unsigned musicians, with 20 megabytes of upload space on a free account and 100 megabytes on a paid one, and artists could ask to have their tracks sold on the site. みなくるビデオ went into beta that August and shipped properly on 8 December 2006. A foreign-language drill followed in June 2008 and a microblog called みなログ that September.

On Monday 20 August 2012 somebody got into みなくるホーム and member information went out the door. Big Tokai stopped the service the same day, saying it needed to review its security. Nothing came back. The formal closure of every みなくる service landed on Friday 30 August 2013, one year and ten days after the lights went out.

~ the case file ~

~ the video site in shizuoka ~

みなくるビデオ is the part that reads oddest now. A regional cable company in Shizuoka was running a video sharing site in 2006, the same year YouTube was bought by Google, and it had thought about the format problem properly: uploads accepted in ten container and codec combinations from 3GP up to H.264, with no cap at all on the size of any single file and a gigabyte of space behind a paying account. You could open what the site called a broadcast station and program it yourself, and you could rate anybody else's shows out of five. Clips were allowed to sit inside more than one person's station at a time.

It also connected to the avatar. A みなくるホーム member's video page wore the same character and the same room decoration as the rest of their account, which is a joining-up that the large Japanese services of the time mostly did not bother with. Phones could upload video to it. Podcasting was supported.

~ the year it was already off ~

The gap between the breach and the closure is where this one actually lives. A company that is going to reopen a service says when. Big Tokai said it was reviewing security and then said nothing for twelve months, which in practice is a shutdown that has been announced in the wrong words, and the announcement that eventually arrived on 30 August 2013 covered every service at once rather than just the one that had been attacked.

mina-kuru.jp does not resolve today. The only readable traces are Internet Archive captures of its subdomains, four of them, caught in early 2007 when the member count was at its height.

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