S! Town (S!タウン)

» see mb.softbank.jp/mb/service/3G/communication/s_town/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

SoftBank Mobile started S! Town in October 2006. It was a town drawn in 3D polygons that lived inside a phone, and you reached it from the handset menu under Communication, because the app came preloaded on almost every SoftBank 3G model the carrier sold. You chose a character from a roster of eleven and you were given a room. Then you walked around a place that was not anywhere in particular, talking to whoever else was walking around it.

The product page called it a town inside your phone where another version of you could live as it pleased. Two small icons sat at the top of that page: registration required, information charge nil. The third thing the page carried was a bar chart estimating how much packet traffic a session would move, because the data was never free and the carrier wanted you on the flat-rate plan before you went anywhere near it. Anyone with the web-access restriction switched on was locked out entirely.

It ran for just under three years. On 26 June 2009 SoftBank published three short paragraphs. S! Town would end on Wednesday 30 September. It had begun in October 2006, and other content and services had been filled out in the meantime. The press release is still live on softbank.jp today, unamended. To the trade press the company was blunter, saying the plan was to concentrate on what customers were actually using. The town itself was never a website. It was firmware on a Japanese carrier's handset, and you got in by holding one.

~ the dossier ~

~ eleven characters ~

The official site split the world into four questions. What S! Town is, what a character is, what a Mu is, and what My Room is. The character was your avatar and the roster ran to eleven, which was the entire range of people you were allowed to be. Everything else about you was something you collected.

What you could do there was the standard feature-phone inventory of 2006, listed in the site's own alt text because the headings were all images: meet new friends, shop, take snapshots, attend events the operator ran on a schedule. There was mail and there was chat. If you ran into somebody on the street you could play a game with them on the spot.

~ the creature called mu ~

The Mu still reads as strange. It was a small creature attached to you, and the site gave it exactly two jobs. It fetched items and brought them back to you, and it told you about people whose hobbies and temperament matched yours, offering them up as friend candidates.

That second job is a recommendation engine with a face on it, shipped in 2006 on a phone with a numeric keypad. Your room had a Mu Space for it to sit in, and a wall carrying an info board and a PC that pushed the latest announcements at you while you stood in your own bedroom. The rest of the room was yours to fill with collected items and redecorate.

~ the packet bill ~

The chart on the service page is the honest artifact of the whole thing. SoftBank was selling a 3D world and estimating the invoice for it on the same screen. Japanese carriers had flat-rate packet plans by 2006 and a flat-rate contract was the recommended way in, which quietly narrowed the audience to people whose bill could absorb a town.

Three years later the company named what it preferred instead, and the thing it preferred was a video service. The town came down on the last day of September 2009 with no ceremony recorded anywhere. The release closes by promising further improvements to come and asking for your understanding. Nothing in those three paragraphs says why.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »