Nico Nico Bookmark

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

~ the obituary ~

Nico Nico Douga's whole idea was that comments belonged on top of the video rather than underneath it, scrolling across the frame at the second they referred to. In June 2007 Niwango asked the obvious follow-up question: why only video. Nico Nico Bookmark let you paste a URL, took a screen capture of whatever was there, and then let anyone stick a comment, called a nicopeta, at any coordinate on the image. Right-click brought up a menu to visit the real site or hide the notes.

The first build shipped on 7 June 2007 with the Japanese word for provisional in the product name, which was Niwango being honest about what it was. ITmedia covered it the same day under a headline about pasting comments onto the web. J-CAST covered it the day after under a headline about how extreme it had already gotten.

That second article is the whole problem in one piece. People were capturing third-party pages without asking and covering them in abuse, and the pages had no say. Commenters raised copyright, and then defamation, and Niwango said publicly that it might have to start investigating and suspending accounts. The beta arrived on 19 September and on 5 October it was over. The stated reason was not the lawyers. It was that the numbers had not grown the way they hoped and there were no plans to bring it back.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

Mechanically it was a screenshot service with an annotation layer, which sounds mild until you notice what it implied. The commented copy lived at nicob.jp, not at the original site. A visitor could read a version of your homepage that you had not written, could not edit, and did not know about. Comments displayed in the order they were posted, with related bookmarks listed alongside.

The only surviving capture of the front page is from launch day itself, 7 June 2007, and it is a wall of thumbnails with IDs already up in the nb1900s. Within five weeks the crawler was hitting IDs past nb6600. Several thousand pages were captured and annotated inside the first month by a service that had four months to live.

Nico Nico Douga could get away with the same trick because the videos being commented on were mostly uploaded by the commenters' own community, in a walled space, with the uploader implicitly signed up for it. A random corporate homepage never signed up for anything.

~ the funny part ~

Sixteen days of beta is not long enough to be killed by a lawsuit, and Niwango was clear that it was not. It died of indifference. The feature that made Nico Nico Douga enormous turned out to be inseparable from the thing it was layered over: people wanted to shout at a video together in real time, and nobody wanted to shout at a corporate site map.

Everyone tried this, and everyone stopped. Third Voice launched the same concept in 1999 and folded in 2001. Google shipped Sidewiki in 2009 and retired it in 2011. Every single attempt has hit the same wall from a different direction, which suggests the wall is not technical. Niwango just hit it faster than anyone, in four months, with the shortest-lived product Nico Nico ever shipped.

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