nowa

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

~ the obituary ~

It was built under the code name PRAC, which the footnotes expand into a phrase about personal reviews and generated communities that does not quite parse even in the original. What shipped on 30 May 2007 was gentler than that. nowa was a blog service from livedoor aimed at people with no intention of keeping a blog: young, light users, mostly women, reached largely through a phone. The slogan on the front page promised a blog that was simple and safe while also doing a great many things, which is a pair of promises that pull against each other.

The core of it was a box called Nanishiteru, meaning what are you doing. You typed a line into it and that line became your blog update. This was 2007, and the question was in the air everywhere, but nowa's version pointed at a blog rather than a feed. Around it sat a real blog with design templates and a public-or-friends-only switch, plus private messages between users. There was no trackback at all. Bolted on beside it were the review and word-of-mouth features that livedoor clearly hoped would turn into something commercial.

It ran for one year and ten months and closed on 31 March 2009. No reason was published that I can find, which is worth stating plainly rather than filling in. What is documented is the context: livedoor had been broken up and sold off in pieces after the 2006 fraud case, and by 2007 only the portal survived as a separate company, rebuilt around user-generated content.

~ the case file ~

~ what the points were for ~

nowa had an internal currency called nowa-en. You needed it to open a channel, and you needed it to use the broadcast feature. livedoor's own description of why is unusually frank for a product page: the points were there as a lubricant to keep the place active, and as a brake on griefing and harassment. Most services of that era handled abuse by writing rules and then hiring people to enforce them after the fact. Pricing the noisy actions was a decision taken before launch instead, and it put the cost on the shouting rather than on the staff.

The brake was set too tight at first. Joining a channel also cost points in the opening months, which meant the barrier fell on the people arriving rather than the people shouting, and that requirement was dropped once it became obvious. The channels themselves were an admission that the one-line box needed somewhere to go. They arrived on 19 July 2007 as topic rooms, some official and some user-made, and the developers said plainly that the model came from IRC.

~ the shout ~

Then there was Shout. You spent points to write a single line, and that line went to every user on nowa at once, bypassing your friends list and the channels alike.

Users hated it. The word in the Japanese write-up is hanpatsu, pushback, and the resolution was that livedoor added a setting letting you stop seeing shouts entirely. A feature that the company charged you to use ended up with an off switch built for the people on the receiving end. It is a small thing, but it is the whole argument about reach in one product decision, settled in 2007 and then settled again by every service that has tried it since.

~ where it went afterward ~

When livedoor closed its social network frepa, part of that membership washed into nowa. Two years later nowa's own users had to do the same thing, and most of them went to Wassr, which had a similar one-line box.

What makes that migration worth recording is that they took the furniture with them. Several nowa channels were rebuilt on Wassr under the name Wasa-channel, and the Japanese record lists seven of them by title. One was a wake-up channel. Another was for reporting in once you had started drinking. There was a word-chain game played only with the names of trains and buses, and a second word-chain game played only with whatever your phone's predictive text suggested first. Seven rooms, carried from a dead host to a living one by the people who had been sitting in them.

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