Nicolson

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

~ the obit ~

Five people could talk at once. That was the hard ceiling on a Nicolson live room with the host counted in, and everybody past the fifth joined by typing over the top of the audio, which is Niconico's comment culture aimed at a telephone call. Dwango put it on the App Store on Monday 12 September 2011, free, and you could not open it without a Niconico Douga account.

The other half of the app was called るすログ, rusu-log, taken from 留守番電話, an answering machine. You recorded a short clip with some text attached and it sat on your profile for other people to play back whenever. Free Niconico members got fifteen seconds per clip and premium members got sixty, which is where the revenue was eventually meant to appear. The one-tap responses went past Facebook's single like and included がんばれ, go on, and わかる, I get it. Dwango's stated argument was that a like could not carry encouragement or agreement, so it shipped a button for each.

This was Dwango itself rather than Niwango, the subsidiary that ran Niconico at the time, and the press contact on the launch release is Dwango's own corporate line with two named people on it. The app did not speak to a desktop at all. Ketai Watch asked at launch and was told there was no PC interop, and no Android version planned either, though one turned up on 19 January 2012 for Android 2.2 and up. Posting out to Facebook had been bolted on back in October 2011.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ five voices and everyone else typing ~

A room had a 主催者, a host, and a thirty-minute ceiling on any single session. Beyond the five audio slots the overflow sat in text, so the shape of a Nicolson broadcast was a small conversation with a crowd commenting on it in real time. There was also a permanent room called 24hライブ with no host and no closing time, which meant you could open the app cold and be talking to a stranger inside a few seconds.

Around that sat a follow graph and two feeds, マイルーム for the people you followed and フロア for everybody. Rankings covered live viewer counts and clip playbacks. An abuse-report button was in the first build, which tells you Dwango had already thought about what an always-open voice room full of strangers attracts.

The screenshots Dwango sent out with the launch release show the live list dated 7 September, five days before anyone outside could install the thing. One room is called 暇人集合っっ, people with nothing to do, assemble, and it has 123 visitors against 67 comments. Another is 大学生話しましょう, students, let's talk, at 67 visitors.

~ the money plan ~

The revenue plan was staged and it never cleared the first stage. Dwango's line to the trade press was that it would grow the user base first and look at advertising after that, with the app doubling as a funnel into Niconico premium subscriptions. The thing that eventually killed Nicolson was stage one.

~ what the notice admitted ~

Dwango announced the closure on 1 March 2013 and did two things to the product the same day: registrations stopped, and so did posting out to Twitter and Facebook. Everything else ran until 31 May. What it put forward as a reason was that this was a service you could only enjoy when the connections between people were there, and that the user count was too low for it to become something all of Japan could be drawn into. The notice led with an apology for how abrupt the announcement was.

The same document says the app had been started from a wish that everyone in Japan would connect by voice and find friends whose values matched their own, and then says, about what actually happened, 運営の予想を上回る文化が生まれました. A culture grew beyond what the operator had expected. So the notice claims the product worked and the arithmetic did not, in that order, a few lines apart.

~ the name went to a shop that never opened ~

nicolson.jp still answers. It returns about fifteen hundred bytes and none of it is Dwango's. The title reads ニコルソン, a mail-order site that connects you through smiles, 2014 edition. Under it sit the words UNDER CONSTRUCTION, dated October 2014, over a promise that the new Nicolson will be born shortly and start a shopping information service before 2015. A footnote states that the page has absolutely no connection to Dwango.

Then the footer links to Dwango and to niconico anyway. The shopping service never opened either, and the construction notice has now been up for twelve years, which is seven times as long as Nicolson itself ran. Apple's search API returns nothing at all for ニコルソン.

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