Yahoo! Blog (Japan)

» see blogs.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Yahoo! Blog was a Japanese language product for Japanese users and nothing about it was ever pointed at me. I have no memory of it and no claim on it. What put it on the list is a thing that happened around it in 2019, when one company closed the two biggest places its own users had ever published anything, in the same year, nine months apart.

The service launched in beta on 31 January 2005, at the exact moment every large portal on earth was adding a blog. It was tightly wired into the rest of Yahoo! Japan, which was the whole appeal, since a Yahoo account was already the default internet identity for a very large share of the country. It was also deliberately simple. You could not edit the CSS and customization was limited, so nobody built anything elaborate on it. People used it the way people used a notebook.

That combination, an enormous default audience and a deliberately shallow product, is how a platform accumulates fourteen years of writing by people who were never going to run their own site.

~ the dossier ~

~ the year of the closings ~

Yahoo! Japan announced on 28 February 2019 that the blog service would end on 15 December. The stated reasons were a review of the blog market and technical operating difficulties, which is corporate for the thing being an expensive legacy system with no path to being anything else. Posting and editing were switched off on 31 August, so the last three and a half months were read only.

Yahoo! Japan had already announced the end of GeoCities Japan in October 2018, with about four million sites still hosted on it, and closed that on 31 March 2019. Japanese coverage at the time was full of the same complaint in both cases, that irreplaceable material was going. A lot of what sat on GeoCities Japan was reference work by hobbyists, the sort of page that is the only source on its topic anywhere.

~ the missing export button ~

Yahoo! Blog had no export function. Not a bad one, none, for its entire life. When the shutdown was announced there was no way for a user to take fourteen years of posts off the platform, and Yahoo! Japan had to build migration tooling from scratch, which did not appear until 9 May 2019, more than two months after the announcement.

The tooling named four official destinations, Ameba, livedoor, Seesaa and Hatena, with Hatena added later in July. It worked poorly. Users reported source data vanishing after a migration run, and since there had never been an export function there was nothing to fall back on. Uploaded data stayed downloadable until 31 March 2020 and was then deleted. Many people simply gave up partway and let it go.

~ what got buried with it ~

There is a difference between a service ending and an archive ending, and it comes down to one feature nobody thinks about while the service is healthy. A blog host with an export button that dies is an inconvenience, because the writing moves. A blog host without one that dies is a deletion, because most people will not retype fourteen years by hand.

GMO's Yaplog, another veteran Japanese blog service, closed on 31 January 2020, six weeks later. That was the end of the first generation of Japanese blog platforms, more or less all at once, and the Internet Archive's partial crawl is now the only copy of a lot of it. Yahoo! Japan did not do anything unusual here. It ran a free service for fourteen years and then stopped, which is what free services do. The lesson belongs to the users, and the lesson is to check for the export button on the way in rather than on the way out.

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