Texpo

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

~ the eulogy ~

Texpo opened at noon on 1 December 2007 and never finished opening. The development plan had gone up two days earlier and named three milestones: the prototype that day, a beta in January 2008, the full version in the summer. The prototype arrived on time. Neither of the other two ever did, and the page footer was still reading PROTOTYPE VERSION on 17 December 2011, the last day the Internet Archive found the site working.

What it was, under the provisional labeling, was a publishing house with no door policy. The unit was a book, and a book held chapters of up to about thirty thousand characters each. You could have as many chapters as you liked and put a cover on the front. Writing was free and reading was free. If you wanted to charge, you priced the book in Moritapo, an electronic currency the operator issued that settled down to a tenth of a yen, and that granularity is why Texpo exists at all: Mirai Kensaku Brazil had put out a payment API years before and waited for somebody to build a content shop with it. The launch post says that after several years nobody showed any sign of doing it, so they made one themselves.

The company was the one that ran 2channel's search. It had been founded in 2003 after the programmer Naozumi Takenaka asked the board's founder what the hardest part of running 2channel was and got told it was searching it. Texpo was devised by Eiichiro Fukami, who had been president there since the middle of the decade. In January 1997 Fukami had opened something he called the internet bookshop Magumagu. Texpo's first homepage greeted you with a line saying welcome, this is an internet bookshop, please browse freely.

~ the dossier ~

~ from the idea to the first word ~

A page on the site called what we wanted Texpo to do is the clearest thing in the record, and it is a list of design positions rather than features. Keep it as simple as possible and do not decorate. Get the writing tool to about fifteen seconds between having the thought and starting to type. Make the boundary between writing something and publishing it hard to feel. Let a payment happen immediately and feel to the payer like taking coins out of a pocket. Let several writers share a book by splitting the chapters between them. And build on the assumption that the web browser is already the best text viewer there is, so do not get clever with the viewer.

That last position held. There was no reading app, and the one request users kept making, vertical Japanese text, got a flat answer in the FAQ: there is no official plan to support it. What did get built was everything around the edges. A comic section, a drawing section, a one-question polling tool, a bookmarking section, a Windows reader, a Firefox extension for reading, a cover editor. The main product stayed a prototype while a small department store grew up next to it.

~ sixty-five million characters ~

The index page printed its own statistics, so the whole arc survives. In January 2008 it held 3,734,982 characters across 438 books and headlined itself a universe of three million characters. By November 2011 it was a universe of sixty-five million: 5,542 books, 41,927 manuscripts, 139,911 revisions. Only 1,990 of those books were ever actually published, which means roughly two thirds of them were written and then left unreleased by their authors.

The flattening the closing notice describes is visible in the arithmetic. Twenty-four million characters went in during the twenty-one months to November 2010 and about seven million during the twelve months after that. Nobody outside was watching it happen, either. Texpo got exactly one piece of press in its life, an INTERNET Watch article two days after launch, and 138 Hatena bookmarks in total across four years. When it closed, not one publication wrote about it.

~ a temporary suspension ~

The notice file was written just before five in the morning Japan time on 29 December 2011, and it is titled system stop. It is unusually honest for a Japanese closing notice. The convention is a date and a thank-you, with nothing said about why. This one gives reasons, in order: page views had stayed low and flat for years, and the system itself was old by 2011. A server failure that autumn was what finally started the conversation. At the end of 2011, it says, we decided to carry out a temporary suspension of the service. Whether it resumes in future is undecided.

It never resumed. The word the operator used is suspension and not closure, and the only place anybody there ever wrote that Texpo ended is a line in the Moritapo FAQ that is still live today, reading service ended 2011, commented out of the HTML rather than deleted from it.

Writers who wanted to keep writing were pointed at anews.jp, where they could sign up as web writers for the company's news site. Texpo's own domain was on sale by 2018 and now carries an unrelated WordPress blog. anews.jp stopped resolving too.

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