Roodo

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

~ the obituary ~

The Internet Archive holds a capture of roodo.com from 2 October 2003, and on it there is a notice to customers explaining that as of 1 October the site formerly called 當舖網, the pawnshop net, would be known as 樂多市場. The auction area was renamed to match. Nothing else was changing, the notice promised, and users could log in with the same accounts. Under that message the page reported 8,878 personal shops and a little over 990,000 items for sale.

Almost nobody remembers Roodo as an auction site. Fourteen months after the rename, a beta blog service appeared at blog.roodo.com, and a notice dated 30 December 2004 announced that 樂多日誌 would open to Roodo members on 1 January 2005. The Taiwanese blogger T.H. Schee had already written it up on 8 December. Within a couple of years the marketplace was a footnote and the blog was the whole company.

It ran for fourteen more years under Shinewant, 嚮網科技, alongside the youth community Youthwant. On 15 November 2018 both were given an end date. The blogs and photo albums went read-only at 11 in the morning on 5 March 2019 and stopped operating altogether on 1 April.

~ the case file ~

~ from pawnshop to blog ~

Taiwan's free blog era ran on almost exactly the same calendar as Turkey's, from about 2004 to about 2010, and the two had no contact at all. Blogcu and Blogspot were what a Turkish teenager on a dial-up line signed up for. Roodo, Wretch, Xuite and Yam Tianku were what a Taiwanese one signed up for, and the whole thing happened in a script and on a domestic web with no route in from Ankara. The dates line up almost year for year, and not one name appears on both lists.

~ the taiwan blog years ~

Roodo's odd distinction is that it built its own biggest competitor. On 20 March 2005 it signed a cooperation agreement with yam, the old Taiwanese web directory, and the two launched a joint product called yam Blog. In September 2006, after yam merged with Webs-tv, Roodo left the partnership and the blogs went onto the new owner's machines under the name yam 天空部落. That service, running on a foundation Roodo had helped pour, then grew into one of the largest free hosts in the country.

It also died first. Yam Tianku shut on 1 October 2018 and deleted its users' files without a working export tool ready. Six weeks later Shinewant posted the notice for Roodo. Taiwan lost both halves of a partnership that started in 2005 inside a single six-month window.

~ ahiahi ~

Shinewant did the part Yam Tianku did not. It built a separate platform called AHIAHI whose only job was to let people package up years of posts and take them away, and the closure notice pushed everyone toward it with a hard deadline of 1 April 2019. Four and a half months of warning with a working export tool is close to the best treatment a free blog host has ever given its users on the way out.

What is left is a redirect. Both roodo.com and blog.roodo.com still answer, with a 1.6-kilobyte page carrying the old title 樂多日誌 Roodo Blog and a line of JavaScript that waits one second and then sends the browser to a marketing domain. The title tag is the last piece of it that is real.

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