Yahoo! Bookmarks (Japan)

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

~ the obit ~

Yahoo! JAPAN opened a free bookmark service on 7 August 2001, two years before del.icio.us existed. It was two products wearing one name. Myブックマーク was the boring, useful half: your own favorites, stored on Yahoo's servers instead of in a browser, so the same list followed you from the machine at home to the machine at work. 人気ブックマーク was the half that tried to be social, a ranking of what everyone else was saving.

The private half is why it lasted fourteen and a half years. Browser sync did not exist for most of that period in any form a normal person could use, and a Yahoo! JAPAN ID was something nearly every Japanese internet user already had. You did not join Yahoo! Bookmarks the way you joined delicious. It was already there, attached to the account you used for auctions and mail, and that is the kind of product that accumulates an installed base nobody at the company is thinking about.

Until somebody is. On 17 April 2013, Yahoo! JAPAN announced that Yahoo! Bookmarks would close entirely on 17 July, with the ability to add or change bookmarks stopping earlier, on 26 June. Yahoo! Clip, a related clipping service, was given 3 September in the same notice. It was ordinary portal housekeeping of the sort that happens quietly a dozen times a year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the notice they withdrew ~

It did not happen. On 29 May 2013, seven weeks before the service was due to close and four weeks before it was due to go read-only, Yahoo! JAPAN reversed itself. The company said it had received a large volume of requests from users asking for the service to continue. The closure was cancelled and replaced with something smaller: the social bookmarking features and the search would be removed on 3 September, and the rest of it would keep running.

Shutdowns get announced and then quietly extended all the time, usually because a migration path is not ready or a contract has not expired. This one was reversed on its merits. A company with the scale of Yahoo! JAPAN counted the complaints about a small free service it had already written off, and gave it another two years and nine months of life. Then it stopped talking about the whole episode.

~ the quiet second ending ~

The second ending came without a campaign. By 13 January 2016 the front page carried one flat line saying the service would end at the end of February 2016, with new accounts already closed and the existing users told they could keep going until then. No petition arrived this time, or if one did it did not work.

The final date was 29 February 2016. Yahoo! JAPAN switched off a fourteen-year-old service on a leap day, which is not even a Japanese fiscal boundary, so somebody simply picked the last day of the month and the month happened to have an extra one. The replacement page went up immediately, thanking people for the long years of use and asking them to keep favoring Yahoo! JAPAN's other services.

~ where the bookmarks went ~

The closure page carried an export tool, available right up to the final day, and it named two destinations for the file it produced. One was your browser's own favorites, which by 2016 could finally sync on its own and had made the whole product category redundant. The other was Hatena Bookmark.

That second one has aged into something strange. Hatena Bookmark launched in February 2005, forty-two months behind the Yahoo service that ended up feeding it, and it is still up in 2026, still ranking entries into categories on its front page. In May 2025 Hatena's lab released a tool to import your saved articles from Pocket, which had just announced its own closure. Japanese social bookmarking produced exactly one survivor, and it has spent two decades being the place other people's bookmarks go when their services close.

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