S! Loop (S!ループ)

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

~ the obit ~

In 2006 my social life ran through MSN, in Ankara, at a desk with a keyboard. S!ループ was the other possible version of that: a place to keep a diary and talk to a dozen people, operated by a phone company, reachable only through the browser on a Japanese handset.

It had four parts. The one called Note was a diary with emoji and image upload that only the friends you had registered could read. Circle was a message board for a group of them. Official Note was a set of company blogs, some of which accepted comments and some of which did not. The fourth was a scheduling tool, where you proposed up to three dates and times and asked people to confirm whether they could make it, and it would send that request to an email address as well as to another S! Loop account.

The service sold a paid tier alongside the free one, and that paid tier opened on 30 October 2006. That is the only start date anybody wrote down, so the service's actual birthday is lost. It ran on SoftBank 3G handsets and on the older 6-2 series, and it ended on 31 March 2009.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who could invite whom ~

Membership was open to customers of all three Japanese carriers, an odd thing for SoftBank to have funded in 2006. Carriers of that era built their whole business around keeping subscribers inside the network, and a service that worked on a rival's handset ran against that.

They kept one string attached. Invitations could only be sent by SoftBank customers, so a docomo or au user could hold an account and write in it, but could not bring in a friend. Every new member came through a SoftBank subscriber, which meant the network only ever grew in the shape the operator wanted. The documentation did not even bother to list which docomo and au handsets were supported.

~ the glyph problem ~

The other cross-carrier detail is the one i like. Each carrier's emoji were displayed as they came, with no conversion step in between. In 2006 the three Japanese networks each had their own incompatible pictograph set, assigned to their own code points, and unifying them in Unicode was still four years away. So a message written on one network and read on another was passed through a service that had decided, deliberately or otherwise, not to get involved.

What a face looked like therefore depended on which company had sold you the phone. That was the real condition of the mobile internet in Japan in 2006, and S!ループ wrote it into its own feature list and left it there.

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