S! Issei Talk (S!一斉トーク)

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

~ the goodbye ~

S! Issei Talk was a group voice service for Japanese handsets, and every reviewer in 2007 reached for the same one-word description of it. Walkie-talkie. You pressed and held a dedicated button on the side of the phone, and up to ten other people on your list heard you live while you talked. Nobody answered a call because there was no call. Letting go handed the floor to whoever grabbed it next.

It launched on 8 May 2007 under the name Circle Talk, and on 1 October that year SoftBank folded it into a batch rename that moved five services onto the S! prefix. That rename gets misread as a death in the registers sometimes, so it is worth stating plainly: the service ran straight through October 2007 under a new label, with the same subscribers and the same button. The group it talked to was capped at eleven people including you, which is a strange and very specific number to design around, and it is the number the manuals printed.

SoftBank announced the end on 22 April 2011, in a single press release that is still live on softbank.jp and still unamended. The release names three services at once and gives them all the same last day: S! Tomodachi Joukyou, S! Issei Talk and Chaku-Deco would stop on Friday 30 September 2011. SoftBank explained that it wished to concentrate its resources on content and services where demand was higher, which is the polite industry formula for a product nobody was using. Signups for the status service that gated Issei Talk closed three months early, on Thursday 30 June.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a free service cost ~

The monthly fee for S! Issei Talk was zero yen, and packets were billed only to whoever was holding the button down. That part was a real kindness: listening cost nothing, and the cost of a session fell on the person talking rather than being split across everyone who happened to be in the group.

You could not buy it on its own, though. Issei Talk was available only to subscribers of S! Tomodachi Joukyou, a presence service that showed your friends your current mood and status, and that cost 210 yen a month. Tomodachi Joukyou in turn required the S! Basic Pack at 315 yen a month. The real floor to use the free service was therefore 525 yen every month, and subscribing to the status product signed you up for the talk product automatically, with no say in the matter. A zero in the price column is only as true as the row above it.

~ the date the encyclopedia gets wrong ~

Japanese Wikipedia says this service ended on 30 June 2015. It did not, and the mechanism behind that error deserves recording, because anyone checking a carrier product can fall into it. SoftBank left a future-tense shutdown banner up on the service page for years after the service was actually gone. Around the middle of 2015 somebody finally replaced that banner with a past-tense tombstone, and the tombstone carried the wrong year. A 2019 edit copied the bad tombstone into the encyclopedia, where it still sits.

The permanent press release and the banner that was on the page at the time both say 30 September 2011. Anyone who trusts the article cuts the stone four years late.

~ three carriers, none of them left ~

Push-to-talk arrived on all three major Japanese networks within months of each other in late 2005, and every version of it was locked to its own carrier. A SoftBank group could not include a docomo handset. That meant each operator was selling a social product whose value depended on your friends having picked the same phone company, in a market where they frequently had not.

They failed in order. au shut Hello Messenger on 31 August 2009, with roughly fifty thousand people using it in a month. docomo ended Push Talk on 30 September 2010, with just under a hundred thousand. SoftBank's lasted a year longer than docomo's and died with the smallest story attached to it. The usual explanation offered for all of this is LINE, and the dates refuse to support it: LINE launched on 23 June 2011, two months after SoftBank had already announced that Issei Talk was finished.

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