Presso

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

~ the obituary ~

Hatena Bookmark had been running since a beta in February 2005, and what it produced amounted to a live reading of the Japanese internet: which article was being passed around this hour, with a comment column attached where the commentary often mattered more than the article. By the early 2010s a Hatena hot entry was a genuine distribution event for a Japanese blog.

Presso, released on 27 March 2014, took that signal and presented it as a news app for the iPhone. The pitch was reasonable. If a bookmark ranking already tells you what is worth reading, the ranking is a newspaper, and a newspaper deserves its own icon rather than living inside a bookmarking tool. This is a product whose entire value sat inside one language and one country's commenting culture, which is a cleaner kind of distance than most: there was nothing to miss out on here unless you read Japanese tech argument for pleasure.

~ the case file ~

~ two years ~

The problem with spinning a reader out of its own source is that the source keeps developing. On 19 November 2015 Hatena shipped version 3.0 of the iOS Hatena Bookmark app and called it the new Hatena Bookmark, a full renovation with new features including one called Timeslip for going back through what had been popular earlier. The main app had become a good news reader.

That left two Hatena apps on the App Store doing substantially the same job, one of them a dedicated news reader and the other a bookmarking client that had grown into a news reader. On 4 April 2016, almost exactly two years after Presso launched, Hatena announced that it would stop at the end of that month, with its functions inherited by the Hatena Bookmark app. ITmedia headlined the news with the lifespan: finished, two years after release.

~ where the features went ~

Nothing was really lost here, which is what makes it a quiet entry rather than a sad one. The ranking and its comment columns both survived, inside a company that is still running the service that fed them. The casualty was the idea that the news view needed its own icon on the home screen.

Presso's two years cover the exact window when a dedicated news app was the thing every publisher and portal thought it needed, and the retreat back into the main app was the industry's answer. It closed on 30 April 2016.

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