Yahoo! Groups (Japan)

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

~ the obituary ~

Most shutdown notices give you a reason that is really a decision dressed as a reason. Yahoo! JAPAN's notice for Yahoo! Groups said something closer to the truth: the system had grown old enough that continuing it had become difficult. No strategic realignment, no thanks for an incredible journey. The code was old and nobody was going to rewrite it.

The service started on 9 February 2004, and it was not built from scratch. It was Yahoo! eGroups with more features attached, a product authored by a company called eGroups K.K., and on 16 March 2004 the operator changed from that company to Yahoo! JAPAN itself. The lineage runs back through the American eGroups that Yahoo had bought in 2000, but the Japanese service was its own thing on its own schedule, and it died more than six years before the Yahoo Groups that English-speaking users remember.

On 7 July 2009 it was rebuilt into something centered on bulletin boards with controls over who could see what. That was the shape it kept until the end. The closure was announced on 18 December 2013, and the service stopped at three in the afternoon on 28 May 2014. Yahoo! JAPAN had switched off Yahoo! Chat at exactly the same hour nine weeks earlier.

~ the case file ~

~ what a group actually was ~

The clever part was how little it demanded of you. To read and post on a group's board you needed nothing but an email address, with no Yahoo! JAPAN ID required at all. If you did not want to use the web interface, you could post by sending mail to a designated address and let the system put it on the board for you. The ID was only needed once you wanted the web-side features.

That design assumption is the period detail. It was written for a membership that was expected to live in its inbox and treat the website as the optional half, which is exactly backwards from how a community product would be built five years later.

~ twenty megabytes ~

Each group came with storage, and the numbers are worth writing down. The Briefcase took any file type, capped at 5MB per file and 20MB in total. The Photo Album took images only and allowed 30MB. The two shared a single visibility setting and could not be configured separately, so a group that wanted its documents private also had its photographs private, whether or not that was what anyone wanted.

There was a shared calendar and a database you could build on the web, both of which were the sort of feature a portal shipped in 2004 because a group needed somewhere to put things and nobody had yet decided that somewhere would be Google's.

~ the reason they gave ~

Free community services usually die of competition or of cost. This one died of age, which is both rarer and more honestly reported. Something written in 2004 and renovated once in 2009 had become, by late 2013, a system whose original maintainers were gone and whose assumptions about email-first membership described nobody still using it. It sits in Yahoo! JAPAN's long list of retired properties now, recorded in a single sentence with a date on it.

What went with it was ten years of archived board posts belonging to groups that had chosen a free host, which is the ordinary way this happens. The closure notice lived at info.groups.yahoo.co.jp, on a subdomain built to announce the end of the thing it was attached to.

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