niconare

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

~ the obituary ~

Dwango opened ニコナレ on 25 October 2015. It was a slide host in roughly the way SlideShare was a slide host, with one difference that nobody else could have shipped: the comments scrolled across the deck while you read it, in the same right-to-left drift that made Niconico Douga famous. You uploaded a PDF and other people wrote on top of it.

The better feature was the one with no English-language equivalent at all. Beyond plain slides, niconare had what it called speech mode, where you recorded audio over your own deck in the browser and the pages turned themselves in time with your voice. A talk you gave once at a study group became a thing anyone could sit through later. You could also record a speech over somebody else's slides if they had left that permission open, which meant two people could narrate the same deck differently and both versions would sit there.

Viewing needed no account, which is worth stating because so little else about it was open. Everything in niconare was in Japanese, and for most of its life posting meant holding a Niconico account. The default answer to slide sharing everywhere else was SlideShare, which LinkedIn had bought in 2012 and which I only ever used the way everyone used it, as a place conference decks went to be found by Google. I know the grammar of comments drifting over a video because Niconico exported that idea far enough to reach me. I never once saw it running over a slide.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

The update log reads like a product somebody was actually working on. Long comments stopped being truncated in October 2015. Links inside posted PDFs became clickable in November 2017. The recording cap went from a short limit to a full 60 minutes in April 2017, and the page ceiling on an uploaded PDF went from 100 to 500 in August 2018. Tags started talking to Niconico Daihyakka, the site's own encyclopedia, that December.

Comments on a deck behave differently from comments under a video. Because each one is pinned to the page it was written on, a question lands next to the slide that raised it, and the answer sits in the same place. Double-clicking a comment in the list jumped you to the exact screen where it had been posted. That is a small thing that makes a recorded talk browsable.

~ the relaunch ~

On 7 December 2018 Dwango announced a renewal for February. On 7 February 2019 ニコナレ came back as niconare, all lowercase, with a new design, support for logging in without a Niconico account, a higher-resolution player that handled 16:9 decks, event pages that grouped talks from the same meetup, and portfolio pages for speakers. It finally worked in a phone browser.

Two things were removed in the same release. The iPhone app was retired, and so was the ability to create a slide inside niconare at all. From February 2019 the service could host your deck and play your voice over it, but you had to build the thing somewhere else first. Seven weeks later, on 27 March, Dwango posted the shutdown notice.

~ the day it died ~

The wind-down was unhurried and well signposted. An export tool for slides and comments arrived on 11 April. New posting stopped on 18 July. The service went off around three in the afternoon on 15 August 2019, and an end-roll page stayed up until 19 September so people could read the credits. VirtualCast, which had wired niconare into its VR presentation tool, pulled that integration a week before the end.

Dwango's own explanation was unusually plain for a shutdown notice: even on optimistic projections, getting the service to sustain itself would take a considerable amount of time. Not that it had failed, just that the wait was longer than the company wanted. A product rebuilt in February and buried in August is a company answering its own question twice in one year.

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