@nifty TimeLine

» see timeline.nifty.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

@nifty TimeLine went live on 28 February 2007 on @nifty Labs, the experiments page of the provider that grew out of NIFTY-Serve. The idea was a 年表, a year table, the chronological chart that Japanese textbooks and museum walls are built out of. You posted entries with dates attached and the service arranged them along a horizontal axis you scrolled sideways, so a subject became a strip you could read left to right instead of a list you read downward.

Themes were open. Nifty's own launch copy suggested keeping a record of a child growing up, or a log of the part-time jobs you had worked, and pointed out that you could put future dates in and use the thing as a calendar. Visibility was set separately for reading and for adding, which meant a timeline could be public and still only accept entries from you. There was a blog part so you could drop a timeline into a blog or a homepage, and a vote button for other people's charts.

Getting in needed an @nifty ID or a PLEASY ID. Both of those are things you only hold if you are already paying a Japanese provider for something, which is a clean and completely ordinary reason a service like this never had a door facing my direction. Nothing was hidden. There was just no account to make.

~ the dossier ~

~ built on rails in 2007 ~

The service was written in Ruby on Rails, and Nifty did not write it alone. Impress reported at launch that the specification and the build were done together with the Network Applied Communication Laboratory, the company that employed Yukihiro Matsumoto, the person who wrote Ruby. Rails had reached version 1.2 the month before, and whether it could carry production traffic for a large company was still being argued about in public, so a national ISP shipping a consumer service on it was a position taken rather than a default accepted.

The logo carried a small blue starburst with a β in it. Nifty never took the badge off. Four years and four months later the service closed still calling itself a beta, which in 2007 was a fashion and by 2011 was just what the file was called.

~ the thirtieth of june ~

The one outside deployment the record preserves is datable to the day. On 24 April 2009 the official site for the fortieth anniversary of 男はつらいよ, the Tora-san film series, started using @nifty TimeLine to lay out its chronology. The banner Nifty made for that survives in the archive carrying a file timestamp of 22 April, two days earlier, which is the entire visible production history of the arrangement.

Closure came on 30 June 2011, the same date Nifty used to switch off About Me and its video sharing service. Afterwards timeline.nifty.com simply redirected to the Nifty front page. The clearest contemporary notice of the shutdown is not a press release at all: it is an April 2011 post by the head of a small company that ran a rival timeline community called Histy. He wrote that nobody seemed to be talking about it, and that having privately treated Nifty as competition, he found watching it go lonely.

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