Rakuten Links

» see links.rakuten.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Rakuten Links opened on 27 March 2006 under the name 楽天広場リンクス, announced four days earlier. It was a social network attached to 楽天広場, Rakuten Hiroba, the free blog service Rakuten had been running since August 2001 and which was renamed Rakuten Blog that same year. If you already had a blog there, you had a Links account waiting: you edited a profile from the admin menu and you were in.

Open registration was the design decision that defined it, and in Japan in 2006 that decision had already been made by somebody else. mixi launched in 2004, was invitation-only, and by 2006 it had become the default answer to what a Japanese social network was. Rakuten arrived two years late with the opposite policy and a product that depended on people already using its blog host. The one place Links kept an age restriction was friend search, which was closed to under-eighteens.

It stayed in beta. Not beta for a few months while the team finished it, beta for the entire four years and eight months it existed, and then on 30 November 2010 Rakuten shut it down. The Japanese Wikipedia article reaches for 突然 to describe it, suddenly, which is a word that usually means there was no notice period worth writing down.

~ the dossier ~

~ the feature list ~

What Links had was the standard Japanese SNS kit of the period, and reading it now is a decent snapshot of what people expected from the format before the feed took over. Communities came in about thirty categories, from work and society down to schooling and entertainment, any user could create one, and the community owner chose between open joining and approval. The front page ranked them two ways, by popularity and by how active they were.

The two features that date it hardest are the diagnosis quiz and the footprints. The quiz was thirty yes-or-no questions, things like whether other people's offhand remarks stick with you or whether you struggle to order in a restaurant, and it would compare your result against a friend's or against whoever was currently looking at your page. 足あと, footprints, told you who had visited your profile, deliberately without any hit counter attached. Photo albums ran on the existing Rakuten Hiroba photo service, and the blog integration just surfaced your latest post titles, since there was never a Links-only blog.

~ the beta that never ended ~

Japanese SNS history is the strongest argument available against assuming the internet was ever one place. In 2006 the equivalent question in Turkey was being settled by Hi5, which I never signed up for, and by MSN, which everybody I knew used for absolutely everything. Rakuten Links was aimed at people who already had a Rakuten blog, in a market I had no account in, and the same goes for mixi, which was vastly bigger than Links ever became and equally absent from my screen.

The ending is unusually legible for a product this obscure. Rakuten was and is a commerce company, and the blog host survived because it fed the shopping business traffic and reviews. A separate social graph with a compatibility quiz on it did not feed anything, so it sat in beta until somebody looked at the line item. links.rakuten.co.jp does not resolve now. plaza.rakuten.co.jp, its older sibling, answered on the first try when I checked.

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