Yahoo! Days

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

~ the eulogy ~

Yahoo Japan started its social network in February 2006 under a borrowed name. The American Yahoo! 360° had launched a year earlier, and the Japanese arm ran the same product for a Japanese audience, on invitations only, with a diary at the center of every account and small communities hung off the side. Five months later the company put the naming question to the public and came out of it with Yahoo! Days on 31 July 2006.

The invite wall came down in stages. From the renaming onward, anyone with a Yahoo! BB connection or a Premium subscription could join without being asked in, and on 13 February 2008 the requirement went entirely, leaving a Yahoo! JAPAN ID as the only thing you needed. By then mixi was what a Japanese person meant when they said SNS, and Days spent the rest of its life as one more thing you were already logged into rather than a place you went on purpose.

Yahoo announced the end on 6 June 2011 and stopped taking new registrations the following month. The service closed on 3 October. Users had until 29 November to pull their diaries out, titles and body text in Movable Type format with the images bundled into a zip, which is a more careful exit than most social networks of that decade bothered with.

~ the dossier ~

~ the naming contest ~

Renaming a shipped product by public vote was not standard practice at a Yahoo property in 2006, and it says something about how the Japanese arm operated. Yahoo Japan was a joint venture with SoftBank and behaved like a domestic company rather than a branch office, which is the whole reason it kept winning at home long after Yahoo had lost everywhere else. Days is a small piece of that pattern: the code came from California and the name came from a reader poll.

~ where I was for this ~

Days ran from 2006 to 2011, which lines up almost exactly with my own TTNet years and the stretch when a chat window sat open on the desktop every evening. That overlap is the entire distance. Japanese social software of the period ran on its own defaults inside its own language, and the Turkish answer to the same question in 2006 was MSN plus a forum account, not a profile page.

Yahoo! 360° I read about at the time, because everyone read about anything Yahoo shipped in 2005. The Japanese fork was invisible from here, and its death was covered in two trade posts that never crossed into English.

~ the day it died ~

By October 2011 Twitter had become a genuinely Japanese product, used as a public diary years before the English speaking side worked out how to do the same thing. Facebook had arrived properly the year before, and mixi was still the domestic default. A general purpose Yahoo social network offering a diary and a friends list had nothing left that any of them did worse.

The export window closed on 29 November 2011. The domain kept serving a notice into the following year, and the product that had been called Yahoo! 360° in two countries was by then dead in both of them.

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