mypop

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

~ the obit ~

mypop started delivering on 8 August 2002, and its own front page marked the day with a bullet and an exclamation point. You installed a free Windows client and then stopped thinking about it. The thing fetched content on its own, put it on the desktop, and hid itself again until there was something new.

What arrived came as channels you subscribed to, and the supplier list says who was prepared to feed a desktop in 2002. Kyodo News sent wire copy. Impress Watch sent technology news and Data Stadium sent sports numbers. A feng shui columnist billed as Dr. Copa sent whatever a feng shui columnist sends, and one of the wallpaper channels came from Kabegami.com, a company that would shortly merge with the one running mypop.

Channel delivery stopped on 31 July 2009. The closing notice says the service had been provided since August of Heisei 14 and ended on the last day of July in Heisei 21, which is this product's whole life rendered in a calendar most of its users would have had to convert. Support stayed open until 30 October. No reason appears anywhere on the page, and the page carries no date of its own, so the day the decision was announced is not recoverable.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ late to a dead idea ~

Push was over before this started. The American companies that had tried to shove news onto a desktop came and went across the second half of the 1990s, and by 2000 the desktop channel was something people brought up as a joke. Japan got one in August 2002 anyway.

The shareholder list on its own 2003 company page is the part that does not fit. Global Media Online, which later renamed itself GMO, was on it next to Dentsu. So was SoftBank Media and Marketing. Some of the largest names in the Japanese internet of that moment had put money behind a desktop channel client years after the category had been written off everywhere else.

~ it learned to pull ~

On 14 June 2004 mypop grew an RSS reader, bundled with a feature that told you when a blog you followed had posted. On 19 May 2005 it added podcasts. Impress covered both, and the second of those articles carries a correction at the bottom fixing the operator's name, which by then had changed twice in fourteen months.

The client barely had to change for any of this. A program built to receive whatever a publisher decided to send was already most of a program for fetching what you had chosen yourself. By 2009 the home page had stopped describing a desktop at all and simply shouted that this was the number one RSS reader in the country.

~ the patent in the footer ~

The 2009 footer carries a sentence most consumer downloads would not bother with. It says that mypop holds an exclusive license, granted by GMO Internet, to a registered patent the sentence calls the hyper patent.

A subsidiary licensing a patent from its own parent and then printing the fact at the bottom of a free download page is a strange thing to put in front of users. It is the kind of line a company prints when it expects somebody else to try building the same thing.

~ the last delivery ~

The channels stopped on a Friday. The support desk then stayed open for three more months, until 30 October, which is a long window for questions about software that had already stopped receiving anything. mypop.jp today serves a page offering the domain for sale.

There is one more sentence in that closing notice, and it was commented out of the HTML rather than published. It said copies already installed would carry on working as an RSS reader. Somebody wrote the reassurance, decided not to promise it, and left it sitting in the source where only the curious would find it.

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