Ninja Counter

» see ninja.co.jp/counter/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Samurai Factory was incorporated in Tokyo on 21 May 2004 by a group of friends who, by their own account, had been playing in a band together. What they built instead was a web-analytics service, at a moment when Japan had almost none, and then they kept adding to it until it was seventeen products wide. The suite went out under the Latin name NINJA TOOLS and was renamed to its Japanese spelling, 忍者ツールズ, on 8 July 2011.

All of it was free, and the pitch was that nothing was crippled. By June 2012 the company was reporting about 1.7 million registered IDs across the whole range, carried by fifty-nine staff. Ninja Counter was the simplest thing in it and probably the most installed: a hit counter, the kind of odometer you pasted into the bottom of a page so the number of visitors became public information.

Japanese coverage of its death reached for the same observation each time, that Ninja Counter had been popular since long before blogs existed and was feature-rich while staying free. Both halves of that are true and the second half is the problem. A free counter is a hosting bill that earns nothing, and in 2020 it was still being served to pages whose authors had mostly stopped updating them a decade earlier.

~ the dossier ~

~ the night the storage went ~

At around two in the morning on Saturday 25 January 2020, every function of Ninja Tools went down together. The operator's diagnosis was a hardware fault in the storage underneath the virtualized platform that ran everything. In sixteen years of operation there had never been an outage at that scale or of that length.

The notice that followed went up at 11:39 on 27 February 2020 and it is unusually readable for a corporate wind-down. Providing a service users could be satisfied with had become difficult, it said, given the environment surrounding the internet today and the technical problems of running it. Looking at how much the tools were actually being used, the company had concluded it could deliver more value by putting its development people on its main and new products instead. New signups had already been switched off before anyone was told.

~ the eight that went and the six that stayed ~

Eight tools were named for closure and they went in waves. On 1 June 2020: the visitor log, the access blocker, the survey form, the mail form and the access ranking. On 31 July 2020: the sandbox, which had been a 525 yen a month product with forty days free. Then a seven-month gap, and on 1 March 2021 the last two, Ninja Analyze and Ninja Counter.

The gap is the humane part, and the notice spells out the reason: paid-plan holders were to be carried to the end of the month their paid period expired in. So the counter was kept running nine months past the first wave of closures, serving an unknown and shrinking number of people who had prepaid for a visitor tally. Auto-renewing plans were cancelled by the system on the closure month so nobody was charged for a tool that had stopped.

The rest of the suite is still there. The homepage host, the blog, the access analytics, the image RSS feed and the ad network all survived the cull, and ninja.co.jp answers today, which is worth stating plainly so nobody later reads this grave as the death of Ninja Tools. The company kept its parent products and cut eight limbs off them in a single announcement.

~ the tool that outlived GeoCities ~

One casualty sat in the other notice published the same day, the one covering features rather than whole products. Ninja Homepage had shipped a dedicated Yahoo! GeoCities Japan migration tool, built to pull your site across when Japan's biggest free host announced it was closing. GeoCities Japan went dark on 31 March 2019. The tool for escaping it was switched off on 31 March 2020, one year later to the day, having presumably moved everyone who was ever going to move.

~ counting in public ~

The counter itself is the only piece of this I have any standing on, and I came to it nowhere near this product. Between about 1999 and 2004 almost every personal page I made or read in Turkey carried one, usually a row of little digit images on a black strip, usually from whichever free provider a forum post had recommended. The number was always lower than you had hoped and it stayed up regardless.

What died in March 2021 is not the habit, which was already gone. It is the last machine still honoring it. Somewhere in that final nine-month extension were pages that had not been edited since the Koizumi government, still incrementing, still telling anyone who arrived exactly how few of them there had been.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »